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Every couple needs a project. For me and my partner, Jessa, this was watching every single James Bond movie in chronological order in the lead-up to Daniel Craig’s swan song, No Time to Die. The year was 2019 – we had only recently gotten together, and had bonded (sorry) over a lifelong love of action and espionage films.
Watching 24 in a row seemed like an excellent way of guaranteeing plenty of couch time in those cosy, canoodling, halcyon early days of a relationship. So we soaked it all in: the Oddjobs and Jawses, the gadgets and girlies, and the shifting social, sexual and political mores of a full half-century.
By the time we revisited 2015’s Spectre (a big meh from both of us), we fancied ourselves full-time James Bond scholars (hot takes include: Tomorrow Never Dies is a better Brosnan outing than Goldeneye; Timothy Dalton is hugely underrated; Solitaire from Live and Let Die is the coolest Bond girl; “I thought Christmas only comes once a year,” is peak screenwriting, actually).
Daniel Craig out and about in Matera in No Time to Die. Eon
We were primed and ready for the epic conclusion to the five-film arc that saw Daniel Craig go from parkour-ing up tower cranes in Casino Royale to complaining on press junkets 15 years later that he’d rather slit his wrists than play the role again.
No Time to Die was scheduled for release in November 2019. A few months before, we learned it had been pushed to February 2020. Then April 2020. Frustrating, yes, but we weren’t worried. What could possibly go wrong between November 2019 and April 2020?
Odd as it may sound, when No Time to Die was postponed for a third time, it felt like ultimate proof that the COVID-19 pandemic had completely taken over our lives. Even as I sat glued to my phone, watching the outside world incrementally shut down, some naive part of me held onto the belief that there were some things in this world too big and too indelible to be stymied by the virus.
Alas, no: No Time to Die would be delayed twice more – first to April 2021, then November 2021. And during that time, for me, it would become the carrot on the end of a very long string – a promise of a return to the old world order, not to mention the completion of a project Jessa and I had embarked on during simpler, happier times – times when long nights on the couch were undertaken willingly, rather than by government mandate.
Some people made sourdough. Some people abandoned their brain cells wholesale to the Facebook algorithm. Me? I watched the trailer for No Time to Die – the same trailer that debuted in December 2019. It felt like a lifeline, emblematic of something much larger: a way back to the wider world beyond my living room.
Like the film itself, the trailer for No Time to Die opens with a car chase. Bond burns rubber in his vintage Aston Martin DB5 through a cobblestoned piazza, pursued by motorcycle assassins. He then takes a nosedive off a medieval-looking stone bridge. I was quick to look up the filming location: this was the UNESCO World Heritage-listed town of Matera, in the southern Basilicata region of Italy (just above the heel of the boot).
Over the course of my dozens (hundreds?) of viewings of that trailer, Matera took on a mystical quality for me; a fairytale kingdom unaffected by the banal horrors of Melbourne’s 262 days of lockdown. And when Jessa and I finally donned our masks and shuffled anxiously into the IMAX in November 2021, the finished film only reinforced my fixation: the opening act of No Time to Die is essentially a 20-minute, 70mm full-frame love letter to Matera. (And after all that waiting, what of the remaining two-and-a-half hours of Bond 25? Three stars.)
The town of Matera is one of the stars of No Time To Die.iStock
Plenty of people couldn’t shake their sourdough obsessions once the lockdowns lifted. I could not shake Matera. And after multiple aborted attempts at interstate and overseas holidays, Jessa and I fixed our sights on what would be our very first international trip together, in May 2024 – to Italy, naturale.
The journey itself played out a little like a European spy caper, albeit on a double-arts-worker-income budget. Instead of a vintage Aston Martin DB5, we had the clanky Jeep Renegade hired from Budget rentals in Bari, which we took turns nervously revving down the SS16 highway en route to our masseria farm-stay in Cisternino. This was our first time driving on the right-hand side of the road, and we quickly discovered that Italian highways operate by Mario Kart rules, with speed limits little more than a suggestion. Believing we must have been on the local equivalent of an Autobahn, I started driving at a carefree 80 miles per hour.
Later that night, a cursory look at a Reddit travel forum warned of hundreds of hidden speed traps on the Italian stradas; horror stories of overdue fines wending their way from regional authorities through hire car companies and finally back to unsuspecting holidaymakers months, even years, after their trip. Bedevilled by the thought of tens of thousands of euros’ worth of fines waiting for me upon our return to Australia, I barely slept a wink.
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The next day’s drive to Matera was even more stressful than the trip to Cisternino: 90 minutes on a single-lane highway with local motorists backing up behind us, vehemently insisting we overtake cheese-laden semitrailers around sharp, blind corners. But then finally, after years of waiting, three flights, nine hours of layovers, and a hundred miles on those perilous highways, we found ourselves at the threshold to the historic city centre.
Walking into Matera feels like walking into a city-sized crater on the moon. It takes your eyes a good couple of minutes to adjust to the entirely monochromatic streetscape, designed with all the logic of a snakes and ladders board – filled with steep stairways, looping cobblestone roads, and thousands of ancient houses packed atop each other. Historians believe the site has been continuously occupied since the Palaeolithic era, with some of the “modern” dwellings dating back to before 200BC.
James Bond (Daniel Craig) chases Primo through the streets of Matera in No Time To Die.Universal
The city seems to wrap around you, extending infinitely in all directions: courtyards and pathways spiral deep down like Dante’s entrance to Hell, while a limestone acropolis towers in the centre like a Middle-earthian citadel. I found myself verging on motion sickness simply staring at the skyline; there are no two roofs, no two chimneys, no two doors or walls or windows that sit at quite the same angle. Matera feels earthen and sturdy but zany and illusory all at once: an M.C. Escher painting by way of Dr Seuss.
For this reason, the place seems to defy easy tourism. The majority of fellow travellers we encountered were walking about dizzily, perhaps in search of a McDonald’s or an escalator (Matera has neither). Had they also watched No Time to Die, been seduced by its perfectly curated and colour-graded depiction of the city, and come in search of that same rustic, Mediterranean idyll, only to find themselves similarly traipsing through an endless, serpentine grotto?
The skies were a solid platinum grey that day, blending in perfectly with the rock-cut city itself, only adding to the impression that we had entered some sort of liminal zone, a self-contained universe accessible only via Strada statale 7. We found Byzantine churches hewn into monolithic boulders; hundred-year-old cinemas propped up in gothic courtyards; underground cisterns, now emptied and traversable via creaking steel gantries.
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At one point, while leaning over a balcony to inspect a clutch of red valerian flowers, I thought I saw a hummingbird, only to look closer and discover it was an insect – a diurnal hummingbird hawk-moth, in fact. It hovered in mid-air, delicately sucking at the valerian’s nectar, and suddenly I realised I was holding back tears. Here I was with Jessa, on the other side of the planet, watching a hawk-moth drink nectar from the flowers of Matera. You risk missing these things when you’re blasting through life at a hundred miles an hour, whether pursued by motorcycle assassins or not.
“Paris Syndrome” is a widely reported phenomenon whereby tourists in the French capital have a nervous breakdown when they discover it to be not all they’d imagined. If I could pitch an adjacent alternative, it would be the “Matera Effect”: when you find a place you’ve long dreamed of infinitely weirder and, if anything, far more interesting than you’d initially thought possible. A place that reminds you that the whole point of travel is not to align the real world with one’s postcard fantasies, but to see the world for what it is: chaotic and strange, with no clear story arcs or Hollywood endings. The best kind of travel doesn’t offer tidy resolution; it only serves to remind you there’s forever more to see.
Now it’s 2026. At the time of writing this, I am yet to receive any speeding fines from the Puglian police. The James Bond franchise has been sold to Amazon, and Denis Villeneuve has been tapped to direct the next instalment. Perhaps Jessa and I will line up another full franchise rewatch in the lead-up to its release, rumoured to be some time in 2028. What could possibly go wrong between now and then?
