Founders Leg 5 · Sunday 4 October 2026
Across the empty uplands of Basilicata, past Matera and over the Murge to the Adriatic.
Last day. It is cold leaving Potenza, so start with layers you can pack away.
Call the crew for a lift, a mechanical or if you are lost. Everyone is also in the ride WhatsApp group.
Light all morning. From mid afternoon an east north easterly of about 12 km/h, gusting to 21 km/h, sits in your face for the final run across the Murge and into Bari. Chilly at 13°C leaving Potenza, 25°C by lunch.
Forecast from Open-Meteo, taken on 30 September 2026. Check it again on the morning.
The country you ride through
Near Vaglio Basilicata are the remains of the sanctuary of Rossano di Vaglio, where the ancient Lucanians worshipped the goddess Mefitis from the fourth century BC. After that the country opens out into huge rolling fields of wheat with hardly a house in sight.
Tricarico keeps its Arab and Norman quarters and a tall Norman tower. On 17 January its men dress as cows and bulls, with ribbons and cowbells, for one of the oldest carnivals in the south. This is the country Carlo Levi wrote about in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), his account of political exile among Basilicata's peasant villages.
Lunch is about 12 km west of Matera. Its Sassi, the old town of cave houses cut into a ravine, are among the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. In the 1950s the government called them a national disgrace and moved the people out. Since then they have become a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1993), European Capital of Culture (2019) and a film set for The Passion of the Christ and the Bond film No Time to Die.
The Murge is a high limestone plateau of stone walls, sheepfolds and wild grassland, much of it now the Alta Murgia National Park. The route passes within a few hundred metres of Altamura Cathedral, begun by Emperor Frederick II in 1232. Altamura's bread was the first in Europe to get protected status. In 1993 cavers found a Neanderthal skeleton in the Lamalunga cave nearby. Altamura Man is roughly 150,000 years old and is still fused into the rock where he fell.
Toritto is known for its almonds and the whole descent is through olive groves, because Puglia makes more olive oil than any other Italian region. In Bari, the Basilica of San Nicola holds the relics of St Nicholas, the original Santa Claus, which 62 Bari sailors took from Myra in Turkey in 1087. In Bari Vecchia, the old town, women still sit in the street on Arco Basso making orecchiette pasta by hand. The Norman Swabian castle and the long seafront promenade are a short walk from dinner.
Local heroes
Rocco Scotellaro was born in Tricarico in 1923 and became its mayor at 23. He was a poet of the southern peasantry, a friend of Carlo Levi and a campaigner for land reform, and he died of a heart attack at 30. His collected poems, E fatto giorno, won the Viareggio Prize the year after his death, and Levi called him the poet of the peasant world.
Bari's own famous names range across the centuries. Niccolò Piccinni, born in Bari in 1728, wrote more than 100 operas and was famous in Paris for his rivalry with Gluck. Antonio Cassano grew up in Bari Vecchia, a few streets from tonight's dinner, and made his debut for his home club at 17. The city's most loved figure is still its adopted patron, St Nicholas, whose feast in May draws pilgrims from across Italy and the Orthodox world.