The following day after completing our Road to Rome tour we met our new tour director and fellow travellers and we set off on our coach for Puglia. I was very excited. This was the tour I had waited two years to do. We had booked a tour 2 years earlier and unfortunately the tour was cancelled as they didnt have enough bookings to run the tour.
This time I chose a guaranteed departure to ensure we didnt miss out.
Our destination was Alberobello, Puglia's picture-postcard town famous for its conical-roofed houses - trulli!
These curious conical-roofed whitewashed structures, clustered in pockets of Puglia are an icon of the region. In fact, this peaceful part of southern Italy is the only place they have ever existed.
This time I chose a guaranteed departure to ensure we didnt miss out.
Our destination was Alberobello, Puglia's picture-postcard town famous for its conical-roofed houses - trulli!
These curious conical-roofed whitewashed structures, clustered in pockets of Puglia are an icon of the region. In fact, this peaceful part of southern Italy is the only place they have ever existed.
In the words of Unesco, which declared Alberobello a World Heritage site in 1996, the easily recognisable trulli (the singular form is trullo) are:
“remarkable examples of drywall (mortarless) construction, a prehistoric building technique still in use in this region. The trulli are made of roughly worked limestone boulders collected from neighbouring fields. Characteristically, they feature pyramidal, domed or conical roofs built up of corbelled limestone slabs.”
Once you arrive in the town’s centre head to the Rione Monti quarter within the 'trulli zone'. Up a slight hill, it contains over 1,000 trulli and almost no other type of building style. It is touristy, with gift shops on every other door way, but it is also very very pretty. The best plan is to have no plan here, and simply meander and wander to your heart’s content, finding the odd quiet street or ridiculously photogenic nook off the main thoroughfare.
The Rione Aia Piccola district just across the road has 500 or so trulli and is less commercialised. It was here where we enjoyed our time most, catching a glimpse of locals who still call these gnome-sized buildings home and elderly groups of Italian men out for a stroll in the streets they've called home long before the tourists arrived. It also affords you the best views over the clustered trulli patches of Alberobello.
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