It was a nice morning on Friday 9th January and we had a further look around Parco della Murgia Materana. The Campervan area in the park is situated in a 19th Century farmstead on the high plateau. The building on the left is the farmhouse. There are no windows on the ground floor - presumably to make it easier to defend. The building to the right is the chapel.

Nearby is a bronze age tomb. Ann went inside to explore.

A little further on are the remains of a neolithic village. This is perhaps what is left of a cist burial.

This hole in the soft limestone is not natural. It was made by people. Nearby are post holes in the limestone. Maybe the hole was for storage or part of a neolithic industrial process?

We returned to the Matera gorge. Here is a telephoto picture of some of the Sassi - the cave dwellings whose inhabitants were forcibly evicted by the authorities in the 1960s - ostensibly for their own good !? This is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We visited the rock church of Maddona delle Tre Porte cut into the side of the gorge. There are some surviving medieval frescos here.

By mid afternoon we were quite exhausted by all these cave visits so we struggled back to our van for a cup of tea.

We then made the quite short journey down to the coast of the Gulf of Taranto where we parked for the night at Lido di Metaponto. We previuosly visited here in May 2012.

Ann tried to befriend the local feral dogs with varying degrees of success. I had a bit of a wary feeling about the place which I'm glad to say proved unfounded.