MAGIC LUCANIA - DRIVING TOUR OF BASILICATA

The open roads of Basilicata in Italy's deepest south offer a unique holiday glimpse of how latin life used to be. Especially if you experience them as part of an affordable 'Magic Lucania'programme designed to open up the region's treasures to adventurous British drivers. Jonathan Crouch and family tried it.

Where does 'Italy' become 'real Italy'. No one, it seems, is quite sure. Even the Italians themselves. Where does the magic start? Well, you know it when you see it. When you fly there, rent a car and lose yourself in the place.

It's a family thing, the side of their nation these people keep hidden from those outside, a secret hidden in a kaleidoscope of private latin life. The endless meals with their convoluted courses. The secret squares in the cities. The covered caves in the hills. The mist that falls in the afternoons over the mountains.

To understand it all, you need to understand where this country came from. A hard thing indeed in the industrialised north, the tourist towns of Tuscany or the rolling hills of Rome. But possible if you're prepared to venture deep into the south to a part of Italy forgotten, even by many Italians. A strange, beautiful, bleak strip of land between the regions of Puglia and Calabria. A place called Basilicata - or as older Italians know it, Lucania.

People come here to find themselves, but first, they must find Lucania itself - become a part of it. Live with those who are themselves as much a part of Basilicata as the valleys and the villages. Impossible in a hotel but probable as a guest of 'Magic Lucania', a programme pioneered by three 'agriturismos' - working farms - that together offer a trio of very different perspectives on the north, the sou...