Trip Tips: Italy's Matera is a 9,000-year trip back in time

Italy is teeming with places that make you feel like you are on a movie set-the Trevi Fountain in Rome, the Amalfi coast near Naples and Venice's lagoons come to mind.

But there is one place in particular that for filmmakers and visitors alike evokes early Christian and even prehistoric times and that is Matera, off the usual tourist map in the southern region of Basilicata, part of "the boot" of Italy.

With its "Sassi" limestone cave dwellings dug into the hillside and cascading in gravity-defying fashion down a steep slope towards the Gravina river, Matera is one of the Italian cities that time forgot.