Maratea Events

The Maratea year turns almost entirely on its patron saint, with a short intense summer season alongside.

The feast of San Biagio

Held in early May over several days. The saint's statue is carried down from the basilica on Monte San Biagio into the borgo, accompanied by the confraternities and by a great deal of the population, and returned to the mountain a few days later. The descent and the ascent are both processions of some length and effort, on foot, on a steep mountain, and they are the two days the town belongs entirely to itself. There are illuminations, bands and fireworks over the gulf around them.

Summer on the coast

July and August bring concerts, open-air events and food nights in the borgo and the hamlets, most of them in the small squares and most of them free. The scale is small: this is not a festival town, and the season is genuinely short, running from roughly late June to early September and stopping abruptly at each end.

Sagre

The hamlets and the villages inland run food festivals through late summer and autumn — anchovies, chestnuts, wine, whatever the season is — and these are where the local calendar actually lives once the beach season ends. They are advertised on paper posters and nowhere else, so ask.

Christmas

Nativity scenes in the churches and a living nativity in one of the hamlets, and the statue on the mountain lit above a town that is otherwise very quiet.

Holy Week

Processions through the borgo, small and well attended, run by the confraternities that also carry San Biagio in May. In a town with more churches than it can fill, Holy Week is when a good many of the usually-locked ones are open.