the trulli of alberobellopuglia 2015 – 6^th entry

 
How can you pass up a title like that? The trulli of Alberobello are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When we got to Alberobello – beautiful tree – I was expecting a small town with a lot of trulli scattered throughout. Instead, the old town is all trulli. In Italian, the old town is called la zona monumentale and all the housing in the area is trulli, hundreds and hundreds of trulli; their cone roofs filling the sky.

Alberobello is in the Valle d’Itria in south-central Puglia. The region is really a land depression, a giant sink-hole, not a true valley. The rock-table that the land sits on is full of caves and the stone is very porous factors that contributed to the depression as cave walls collapsed because of drainage. The stone that got exposed because of the land sinking is what the peasants used to built their homes – the trulli – and the stone walls the form the boundaries of their properties and the lanes we drive on.

I had seen pictures of Alberobello, but I had no idea the old town had such a dense collection of trulli. Seeing that many trulli, all clustered together, is what make Alberobello amazing. (These trulli all have their original stone cones. Many of the renovated trulli throughout the Valle d’Itria have replaced the ancient stones with modern stone-bricks that keep the look, but change the engineering of the original trulli. The old stone was long, wide and flat. These were stacked without mortar to form the cones.)