The Temple and the Trees

Living Archive of Southern Italy

A journey through the cultural landscapes of Puglia and Basilicata, where rituals, harvests, history and food bring people together.

New 6-day  Workshop June 19–24, 2026

We will take you to the mountain village of Pietrapertosa, where houses are built directly into the Lucanian Dolomites rock face, and the local culinary culture still carries traces of Arabic influence, offering a striking contrast to the landscape surrounding our workshop residence in Gravina.

Witness one of the most remarkable traditions of the region: the arboreal ritual of the ’Ndenna festival in Castelsaraceno, an ancestral woodland ceremony in which a towering tree trunk and the crown of a different tree are carried down from the forest and joined together in the town square, like a symbolic marriage, before being raised as part of a communal fertility rite that has endured for generations.

Morning walk with the shepherd as he leads his flock out to pasture, followed by working with a shepherdess to make pecorino canestrato, scamorza, mozzarella, and burrata.

Travel along the ancient Appian Way (Regina Viarum) to the Roman town of Venosa, the birthplace of the Latin poet Horace. There, we will taste the region’s volcanic Aglianico wine and meet a local butcher to learn how an animal is prepared for different traditional cuts of meat.

From Venosa, we continue to the small port town of Trani, once an important Venetian trading port on the southern Adriatic, for a seafood dinner along the harbour.

With the guidance of an art historian, come to understand the works of Carlo Levi, artist and author of “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” as documents of the social history of southern Italy during the 1930s and how they influenced the collective imagery of Matera, followed by your own exploration of the soft sandstone dwellings of the Sassi historic centre.

We will go to Lama d’Antico, a rupestrian settlement set among ancient olive groves, before continuing to the Adriatic Sea for lunch at the fishermen’s cove of San Vito.

At Metaponto, we will visit the ancient Temple of Hera, overlooking the Ionian Sea, where the philosophers of Magna Graecia once sought the order of the world in number and harmony. Standing among the remains of the Greek sanctuary, we can sense the enduring tension between the ideal vision of Pythagoras and the disruptive insight of Hippasus — a contrast that offers a surprising way to understand the landscapes of southern Italy, shaped by the meeting of perfect forms and lived experience.

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