The Trulli of Alberobello

Interesting facts

Walls of a trullo can be remarkably thick: they range from about 0.8 metres up to 2.7 metres, the maximum recorded at the Trullo Sovrano.

Building a trullo usually began underground: digging the household cistern supplied the first stones, and its vault often carries the floor of the house above.

The karst plateau around Alberobello has no permanent surface water, so rain from the roofs was channelled into those cisterns to supply the household.

Each cone has two skins: an inner vault of limestone blocks and an outer layer of slabs tilted slightly outward so that rain runs off.

The carved pinnacle on top of a cone, shaped as a disc, ball, bowl or polyhedron, was traditionally the signature of the mason who built it.

Many of the whitewashed symbols seen on cones today, including those along Via Monte Pertica, were painted only in the late twentieth century during roof renovations.

The word trullo comes from a Greek term for a dome; locals in the Murgia traditionally called these houses casedde, little houses.

Alberobello takes its name from Arbore bello, beautiful tree: a 1704 map shows its first cluster of trulli standing in a clearing of a large forest.

Around 1620 Count Giangirolamo II Acquaviva had a mill, a bakery and an inn built here, the start of the settlement's growth into a town.

The heyday of trullo building came in the late nineteenth century, when the spread of vineyards across the Itria Valley brought new prosperity.

Why it is worth it

Walk up into the Rione Monti district of Alberobello and the town turns into something from a fable: lane after lane of small whitewashed houses crowned with grey stone cones, rising in rows up the hillside. These are the trulli, and nowhere else is there a whole living town district built of them. The protected area covers two quarters, Rione Monti with about 1,030 trulli and Aia Piccola with about 590, plus several individual buildings, and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. From above, the roofs read like a field of pointed caps.

Each trullo is built without mortar. The walls are thick limestone masonry, whitewashed, and the roof is a corbelled dome: rings of flat limestone slabs laid dry, each course stepped slightly inward, until the cone closes at the top. A decorative pinnacle caps the roof, and many cones carry religious or mythological symbols painted in white; both were meant to bring luck and keep misfortune away. The Trullo Sovrano, the only trullo with two storeys, shows how far the technique could be pushed and preserves early twentieth-century furniture inside.

The reason for all this dry stone is partly fiscal. In the sixteenth century the Counts of Conversano, the Acquaviva, settled peasant families from nearby Noci on this forested land. Local tradition, repeated in many histories, says the counts required houses to be built without mortar so they could be treated as temporary structures and dismantled quickly, avoiding taxes owed to the Kingdom of Naples on new settlements. Whatever the exact motive, the limestone of the surrounding karst supplied the material. Alberobello stayed a feudal holding until 1797, when King Ferdinand IV of Bourbon freed it and made it a royal town. The busier Rione Monti is full of shops; the quieter Aia Piccola is still mainly lived in, and gives a truer sense of the place.

Getting there

The trulli districts are in the centre of Alberobello, a small town in the Itria Valley of Apulia; the nearest larger town is Noci, about 9 km away. The nearest airport is Bari Karol Wojtyła International Airport (BRI), about 56 km away. Alberobello has a station on the Ferrovie del Sud Est railway, with trains from Bari (sometimes with a change at Putignano), and buses also connect the town with Bari.

The Trulli of Alberobello

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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