Welcome to “Trulli-Town”! So not all of Alberobello is made in the trulli way there are two quite large parts of the city full of these whitewashed, stone buildings with cone shaped roofs, which are one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Italy.
The archaeological finds – that is, the first trulli settlements – date as far back as the Bronze Age, while the trulli still extant today go back to c. 1350; the more uneven and shaky structures were destroyed and reconstructed (rather than repaired) time and time again.
Legend has it that this dry-wall construction, made without mortar, was imposed on the peasants of the area in the 15th Century, by their lords the Counts of Conversano, in order to evade an edict by the Kingdom of Naples that demanded tribute, or tax, on every new urban construction. Indeed, these types of settlements came to be identified as temporary and unstable, easy to demolish, and not taxable.(www.italia.it)
Kind of “houses to go” – if you wanted to move you could take the limestone and rebuild it somewhere else, or just use the materials of an old trullo.
1 cone = 1 room
The buildings are usually square and have very thick stone walls, constructed without mortar. The thickness strengthens the structure and also helps regulate the internal temperature. The roof is actually a dome, as you can see when you enter one of the buildings, but is almost invariably built up on top into a cone shape, topped with a spire. There is generally a central room, with additional living spaces in arched alcoves. Residential trulli are smartly whitewashed, and their roofs are often decorated with fanciful painted symbols supposed to have religious or superstitious significance. The fanciness of the spire decoration was something of a status symbol: it showed the builders’ skill and thus the spending power of the owners. Frequently the houses consist of more than one trullo roof: they are more like trullo complexes crowned with several roof-cones.(www.italyheaven.co.uk)
They keep the inside cool in the summertime and warm in winter – so it´s a little dark inside as the windows are tiny, but still very cosy and comfortabel, they are bigger inside as they seem.
Elena and her family were on holiday in Puglia and we met almost in the middle and used a little lost area for a short destination shoot. (Dress by Irina Hofer)
There are kind of two parts of trulli sites: Rione Monti, which is the one with a lot of shops, restaurants and most of the tourists and almost vis-a-vis you find Aia Piccola, way more quite, almost no people were walking around, a lot of the trulli are private and inhabited and a lot of B&Bs and apartements to rent.
View of Rione Monti:
In Ara Piccola:
Trullo Sovrano – it has two floors and was built in the 18th century by a wealthy priest-family.
