Guardia Perticara

Proudly and unanimously recognized at a national level as one of the “Most beautiful villages in Italy”, Guardia Perticara is objectively and architecturally one of the most precious, intact and photographed urban pearls of the entire Basilicata. Set in an exquisitely scenographic and theatrical way among the gentle and harmonious agricultural hills of the Sauro river valley, over the years the town has become famous throughout the South for being universally defined and known as the magical “Town of stone houses”.

Crossing the slow road borders of Guardia Perticara means taking a true, profound and unexpected visual and emotional leap into the medieval past from the first moment. The entire, tiny and well-kept historic center is, in every single detail, an undisputed masterpiece of aesthetics, of harmonious rural architecture and of exceptional and loving building conservation: extraordinarily narrow and winding alleys, steep and shiny stairways, massive centuries-old portals finely adorned with heavy and austere noble coats of arms, elegant arches and even the most humble terraced peasant houses are all, indiscriminately and severely, created with the warm, thick and fascinating naked exposed local living stone. This formidable architectural respect creates an incredible stylistic, aesthetic and chromatic uniformity that enchants the attentive gaze and immediately warms the traveler’s soul.

Among its suggestive silent streets, wonderfully embellished with small flowered wrought iron balconies, geranium plants and an almost reverential and unreal silence broken only by the wind, stand here and there ancient churches, porticoes and tiny intimate squares that seem artfully designed by a Flemish painter. Guardia Perticara is, in conclusion, an almost fairy-tale place, where time seems to have truly and gently stopped for once, capable not only of giving a prolonged unique visual sensorial experience, but of inadvertently transporting the visitor to a very distant era, marked by very slow natural rhythms, by the sound of footsteps on the stone, by ancient and mountain scents and by an immense and intact, proud and pure Lucanian architectural beauty.