Melfi Culture

Melfi is a working town with an outsized history, and its culture runs along both of those lines at once.

Aglianico del Vulture

The Aglianico grape on volcanic soil produces a dark, firm, long-lived red, and Aglianico del Vulture is the one wine Basilicata is known for internationally. It is grown on the slopes around the mountain, ages for years, and is still far cheaper than its quality warrants. Several producers take visitors, and the harvest runs late — often into November.

The Rapolla sarcophagus

Found at nearby Rapolla, this second-century marble sarcophagus carries a reclining figure of the woman buried in it and, around the sides, deities in small columned niches. It was carved in Asia Minor and shipped here, and it is the single finest object in Basilicata.

A factory town

The car plant outside town employs thousands and draws workers from across the region. Melfi is therefore not a museum village: it has shift patterns, union politics and a working-class economy, and that is part of what it is.

Around the Vulture

Melfi is the largest of a ring of towns on the volcano, and several are worth the short drive. Venosa was a Roman colony and the birthplace of the poet Horace; it has Jewish catacombs of the fourth to ninth centuries and an abbey, the Incompiuta, deliberately left unfinished since the eleventh. Rapolla has a Romanesque church and gave up the sarcophagus; Rionero is wine country and brigand country both.

The table

Interior Basilicatan food: lamb, lucanica sausage, baccalà, chestnuts from the Vulture, peperoni cruschi, and pasta with everything.