ABOUT BASILICATA IN SOUTH ITALY
To get to know Basilicata does nowadays represent a real unique and wonderful experience. This is a land with open nature free from tourists and contamination. It doesn’t matter if you as a visitor has a curiosity of exploring and travel over mountain tops and hills that offer breathtaking and unusual panoramas, or if you want to see cities full of history. Not to forget all untouched seaside towns with clear water and never ending beaches of fine, golden sand where the Greeks settled down VIII B.C. Wherever you travel in Basilicata you will explore something new every time. As when you find a new small and picturesque town on the top of that hill that you didn’t know about before. You get to know new people and new local specialities in a small restaurant without paying a fortune. When you drive down on the other side of the hill there is a new type of landscape, sometimes it looks like a moon landscape with the hills made of clay, sometimes like Toscana and you never know what will wait for you after the next crest.

This is the only region in Italy that has two names, Basilicata or Lucania, with Basilicata officially recognized nowadays. In older times the name Lucania was used and it is believed to come from the Latin Lucas either because it was a woody land or because it was populated by the Liky (an ancient people from the Anatolia). The first documentation of the name Basilicata has been found from 1175 and it probably originated from the name Basiliskos, a Byzantine administrator.

Basilicata lies next to Campania in west, Puglia in north and east and Calabria in south. It has “two seas”, “Mar Tirreno” and “Mar Ionio” both with the classical picture of the Italian seaside.