Today I went the furthest away from Pisticci that I have been in nearly 2 years.

I went to the airport at Bari with a friend to drop someone off and on the way home we stopped at a shopping centre where we found my favourite shop ” flying tiger”.

I now have one of these wooden doll things which bend so that you can pose them and use them to draw figures and one small box of Christmas chocolates. Hurray!

Then to completely get into the Christmas mode we went into a big store full of decorations and more decorations and then more……. and Christmas music…..

Next we headed for Matera which was on the way home and found after driving around for some time, an underground car park where the staff park your car and charge €1.50 an hour. I was sort of impressed as our car was driven off and we hoped we’d see it again. ( we did , and as it was fairly central would recommend it.)

The rest of this blog will be photos and they are as good as I could make them ,but can’t express the depth, the feeling , the sounds, the atmosphere and the general amazingness of the Sassi of Matera. I had forgotten how beautiful and special it is.

I would say where we were except I don’t exactly know as we just wandered this way and that , up and down so many steps. We were at the little rock church which is in one of the photos , but other than that we were all over.

Am now trying to decide which photos I might use as reference for my next watercolour.

What a wonderful day.

Cheers