Destinations Destination Review Basilicata: A South-Italian holiday in a vintage car

Last year my partner and I went on holiday to Southern Italy, a part of the boot that we hadn’t visited yet. An experience completely new to us and very exciting…
On the internet I had found “Meridianosedici”, a tour operator not only specialized in Italy’s South, but also in holidays in vintage cars. Amalfi Coast, Puglia, Rome, all possibilities sounded absolutely great and we had some difficulty deciding. Finally we threw a dice and – went to Basilicata.
The arrival was fantastic. The panorama along the coast, the pine trees, the light and the colours – and Maratea. It really was as beautiful as described. A glass of prosecco, while we met the organizers and the other guests of the tour. What a pleasant and comfortable atmosphere! It made me think of A Room with a view : From the terrace you could look down upon the villages’ roofs, the well-kept gardens rich in flowers, smell the salty air of the sea. It was just amazing.
We were introduced to “our” cars. My partner and I would be driving a shiny red spider from 1970, but in the inside you could not make out a single trace of its age, the carpets and everything seemed perfectly new.
Our tours gave us the opportunity to see parts of Italy that maybe other tourists will never see, on a steep road along the coast and across the mountain chain past medieval hamlets and again tiny little seaports! Mostly secondary roads where there was hardly any traffic, I wouldn’t have imagined driving on Italy’s roads so relaxing and so wonderful, in an impressive nature!
For lunch we stopped in particularly nice places, not just in restaurants, at a little seaport for instance. The tables chosen for us were absolutely perfect, in the right corner of a terrace above the sea and so on, and then these incredible dishes, fine seafood, but in sophisticated creations I could never explain in words. I liked very much the way how our guides told us curious stories even about the food and its connection to the land and its history.
Each day was so much fun and full of many things to see. In the end, we couldn’t agree on which tour we had enjoyed most. On our flight back we started already discussing our next holidays in Southern Italy. Maybe the Puglia Tour, my partner said so we would get “deeper inside” of the land. I think what we can easily agree is that we will certainly repeat the experience in Triumph convertible!

Sure, I’ll try, but in the meantime I’ll send you the link to the website where there’s really a beautiful collection of pictures of the journey. Here, I’ve just found it, it’s: http://www.meridianosedici.de/Oldtimerreisen/oldtimering/basilicata_inglese.htm