Today we drive!
We hired a car from a local rental company (GoRent) and drove to Matera for a day trip.
Driving in Italy is exciting! The cities and towns are the hard part. Once you’re on the Autostrada, it’s plain sailing.
The traffic signs are confusing. When it seems to say 50 km/h and you do this, others feel like they are passing you at warp speed.
🤌
Not keen on getting a speeding fine, I follow what the speed signs and the car GPS tell me—until it feels dangerous, and then I speed up to “local traffic speed” for a bit to avoid accidents.
Mostly, the trip to Matera was uneventful—a good thing.
Coming into Matera, we had no idea where we were headed. We just wanted to go to Matera. 🤣
We learned that the white parking lines were free (you don’t see many of these). Blue are paid, and yellow are for residents.
Driving through town, we finally saw a parking 🅿️ sign and headed for it. Wow… it was right in the center and cheap. A massive fluke.
After parking, we headed out to explore—but as it was lunchtime, we were ready to eat. We wandered around the main piazza and then up a few streets. We eventually found a lovely little panini bar and ordered a sandwich each. They were amazing.
After lunch, we went back to the piazza to find an Ape tour (Ape means bee 🐝 in Italian and is what they call the small 3-wheeler bikes).
We agreed on a price with an Ape rider and off we went to explore the ancient city of Matera. It was amazing. Some truly old stuff here.
The tour was great and we ended up back in the main square. We wandered around more and got ready for the drive back to Monopoli.
Back in Monopoli, it was the town festa. We had a home-cooked dinner, then wandered up to watch the town procession. It was great to be in town to see the local festa.
