THE REAL ITALY

You'll probably never have heard of Basilicata, one of Italy's southernmost regions. And that's a good thing. At least for those of us wanting to keep hard-won discoveries to ourselves. Those wanting a break from the established tourist trail. Those wondering how the sun-dried states of Southern Europe used to be before package holidays, package food and package people. In Basilicata, armed only with a rental car and a sense of adventure, you'll find out.

Today, it's easy to think that undiscovered Europe - beautiful landscapes largely free of tourists with English rarely spoken - exists only in memory. The kind of trip your parents maybe took in the Fifties. Or something you saw on an old edition of Whickers' World. But Basilicata makes you believe again. Here's the part of Italy that EU subsidies forgot. So there's a patchy road network, an almost total lack of railways, not a single major airport and not even a coastal port for the 617,000 inhabitants, despite the fact that this huge region is washed by the Tyrrhenian Sea to the West and the Ionian Sea to the East. Which is just one of the reasons why, down here in the boot of this Latin nation, life really hasn't changed much in the last half century or so.
To be honest, before this trip, I thought I'd already experienced Italy, my motoring travels having taken in the industrial cities of the North, the canals of Venice, the bustle of Naples, the glories of Florence and Siena and the rolling hills of Tuscany. If you've visited any of these, then maybe like me, you've come away impressed but perhaps a little detached from it all. As if something was missing, the real Italy curtained carefully away, far from the sites and splendours, the tourist traps and the trattorias.

Which was why I found myself one steaming hot summer's day in Basilicata, a long empty road shimmering ahead of me in the July heat, my wife comfortably asleep beside me in our rental car, the children squabbling amicably in the back. Here, I reflected, was a land that, over centuries, has welcomed peoples, seen the rise and fall of civilisations, undergone invasions and given birth to myths. If the real Italy still existed, then here, I decided, is where we would find it.

Like many family travellers, we didn't want the expense or constraint of a hotel or the hard work of a self-catering apartment. Fortunately, consultations with the ever-helpful APT Basilicata tourist office (www.aptbasilicata.it) revealed a third option, found in the region-wide Agritourismo network of farms and old houses that welcome visitors like family members, offering as much - or as little - as you need to make your stay comfortable, affordable and agreeably different. Ours was the L'Orto di Lucania (www.ortodilucania.it) , a working farm in yellow, rolling fields below the little 11th century hill-top town of Montescaglioso, where the owners, Fulvio and Cinchia, were waiting to welcome us.
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