In the boot of Italy, close to Bari, you’ll find the city of Matera. It’s small, about 40,000 people, and is generally overrun by tourists — I’d recommend going off season to avoid the worst of the crowds. In many respects it’s a typical small Italian tourist town; you’ll find the usual assortment of gelato and pizza and trattorias.

But the heart of Matera is the Sassi. Sassi means cave house, and the city is built over and around a steep, complicated cave system that’s been inhabited for around 9,000 years. During all that time people have lived in the caves, digging out cisterns and storerooms and churches and homes. In the 1950s the government, embarrassed by the lack of sanitation in the Sassi, evicted most of the inhabitants. 25 years later, recognizing their value, people started moving back and modernizing them.

Today the Sassi are filled with restaurants and bars and shops and art galleries, all in a bewildering array of twisting paths and stairs and roads. You can wander for hours — you really should wander for hours — getting lost and found and lost again, as the sun slowly sets and the heat of the day settles into something more manageable.

I don’t know if you need more than one or two days there to see it. But then again, sitting out in an open air restaurant just after dark, finishing off a bottle of wine, looking out over the lights sparking all the way down to the base of the Sassi, you’ll probably wish you had at least one more.