Matera's Ancient Heart: Sassi Open Bus & Cave Home Tour

Office was very helpful to download audio guide. On time for departurecomfortable bus, very good views Enough time on each visit. Kind driver.

Started poorly with a 25 min late.waiting outside meeting point, no seating. No intro welcome from driver, then the English commentary and telling you about points of interest and history etc would not work. Lovely views of .atera for the park opposite. Beautiful sight with lovely sun set. Overall tour disappointing

Excellent value for money and Anita, our guide was excellent. A very hot day so was glad not to be seeing everything on foot. Able to get a real feel for the Sassi area as well as a 40 minute stop to visit a cave house and walk up to the church.

Our guide was very good. He explained to us about the Matera very well. The tour bus took us to various spots for over looking sassi and visited real sassi house and took us to panoramic city view points. We did 6:30 pm tour and it was good way to see the city. Well worth the money and time.

Best way to see Matera where the driver and guide led us around the tiny roads well. I recommend it.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to give this tour a high rating. The link for the meet up is wrong on Google maps, so we arrived and waited 10 minutes before realizing there was no signage linking the tour company and this spot. I tried calling and language and connection dropped the call. If not for a nice Italian lady who saw that we were confused and lost, I would have never found the correct location. It was after her call to the office that we were pointed in the correct direction and told to walk for 2 minutes. By this time, the tour had left. I then had the employee behind the desk not believe me about Google maps, until he looked it up himself. He then got on the phone and spoke with someone, then proceeded to usher us out of the office and tell us to follow him. I stated that we just wanted a refund for the tour but he insisted that we follow to meet the bus. This is now 30 minutes after the tour started. When the bus arrived, after walking 10 minutes, it was 7:05 pm and he told us we had another hour on the tour. At no time were we offered the audio guide link, explanation about the Casa Gotta entry tickets or a map. This bus drove 15 minutes out of the town to a view point across the gorge, where we had a picture opportunity for 10 minutes, then back into the bus and back into town. He dropped us off at 7:40pm. This was a disappointment for sure, and definitely a learning option for them. Recap; check the address for pick up and make sure you receive all that is promised in your ticket purchase.

The panoramic view of the sassi coming alive with lights on in the evening hours was amazing. Very exciting experience!

Wonderful excursion. the 5:30 tour was great because we were able to see the town from the other side of the valley at early evening with lights. Absolutely amazing

Best way to introduce yourself to the magic of Matera. Comfortable, small bus travels easily through Matera stopping for multiple tours and photo ops. Narrated in your language it is a great 2 hour intro into Matera. Do the 5pm tour and get a panorama of the Sassi at sunset!

The most memorable part of the tour was the sunset view over the old town, historic town views and some cave dwellings. The tour initially started with difficulty because when we arrived at the meeting point, we were asked if we had our headphones with us for the English guide. None of the English or French speaking group had headphones, and the guide spoke Italian to the Italians to describe what we were seeing. With this difficult situation, the guide downloaded English and French descriptions of things we were seeing, to her credit. Before the tour, the travel agency pointed out that the tour notes indicated we needed a headset, however we had booked this tour some weeks before and with prior travelling each day, we had overlooked these notes at the time of the tour. To prevent this happening on future tours, we requested a reminder be included in the top line of the tour, as it only mentioned “English audio guide” - no mention of having to provide our own headsets. The person who brought his headset was not able to access the information anyway. The tour did take us to see some of the places that were important to see, but it was perhaps not the best tour on offer.