After reading about Matera and watching the car chase in No Time to Die many times, I felt I already knew the place - it was essentially a grand ancient city with Sassi caves that date back 9,000 years and a train station where they say goodbye in the movie.
GETTING THERE : First of all, there is no normal train route to the city at all. I read that there is a private train station but never actually saw it. Most trips there involve a bus. From Salerno, it was 3 hours of train and 20 minute bus. From Polignano a Mare, it was 3.5 hours each way. However, if you have a car its only an hour drive.
Furthermore its a pretty large city, and unlike most European cities, the historic place is not the city center. We had an Italian driver who had been there before, and even with google maps, he had to ask multiple locals where the cool place was.
ACTUAL SITE : There is basically a big hill with a church at top, and ramshackle collection of stone homes on the hillside beneath the church (which is ok but not very remarkable). There is another smaller hill facing the church, and the ramshackle dwellings come up that side too. There is something like a historic city center on this other hill with dozens of shops, and a good vantage point to take a picture of the hill with the church.
The thing is that these are not the famous cave dwellings. There are a few caves here in there turned into shops but for the most part, the ramshackle collection of houses are fairly modern - maybe 40-100 years old I would guess. Some are missing roofs and uninhabited, but many are lived in, with potted plants and such. So you are essentially looking at a half restored stone ghetto. You can walk around the little pedestrian roads. Some "estates" are blocked off with gates. The 3 cave shops I saw were pretty unpolished and unattractive.
Its looks somewhat impressive from the vantage point but the entire is not really very picturesque at all. And this is made worse by almost every view having electrical cables strung up blocking a clean shot. You can hike up to the church, and there is a place you can look down from there which is fun to take a look but even les picturesque. We had a coffee at a little cafe before walking back down.
SASSI CAVES : The famous caves you have come to see are a mile or two away. We just saw the area as we were leaving and its a large complex of caves in shallow canyons - but it looked closed to the public. It was fenced off with locked gates. No one was there. It looked cool from what we could see but totally different than the movie and travel photos show. Our guide said it may be possible to trek in there with hiking poles and gear - and indeed the reason these were evacuated in 1952 was because the places are dangerous and possible disease ridden. Perhaps you could overfly it with a drone, but not sure it would look like much. It might be cool if they would build a bridge over the real caves so you could see the actual historical place with safety.
CONCLUSION : So the entire experience was an expensive or time consuming bait-and-switch. I wished we had never come. I don't feel any photo from the day was worthwhile. Maybe I missed something but I left feeling this place was way over-hyped. There seemed to be some place that was selling tickets to see something near the city center vantage point but it did not seem to be open mid-day.
BREAD : We did have the famous local bread - which is ok. Its just a big giant blob of bread. We bought ours fresh from the oven too hot to the touch to eat for 10 minutes. Kind of a hard crust but entire interior was soft and delicious. Flavor was just normal bread flavor. Nothing exotic or different. At 5 eu, a bit expensive perhaps compared to a French baguette.