Our Blog - Southern Italy - Alberobello
The weather turned horrible as we headed to Alberobello, a small town of a little over 10,000 people that is a major tourist destination for its unique trullo buildings. This is one of the places that does NOT go back to Roman times ... only to the early 16th century.
What is a Trullo? It is a particular style of building in this area, and Alberobello has the largest concentration of them anywhere. The story goes that the Count of this area wanted to avoid paying taxes to the Spanish viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples. To do this, he instructed all of the peasants to build their houses dry, without using mortar, so that they could be easily demolished. Mind you, they needed to build a house that would also be as solid as possible, within the given limitations. They found that a round building with a self-supporting domed roof, composed of overlapping stone circles, to be the simplest and most solid configuration. Each domed roof is embellished with a hand-worked sandstone pinnacle, that may be one of many designs - disk, ball, cone, bowl, polyhedron, or a combination thereof, that is supposed to be the signature of the stonemason who built the trullo.
There are two main sections of town that contain trulli (the plural of trullo). The first being Rione Monti, which is the "tourist section" of town and there are literally a thousand trullo's winding up the hillside. As you would expect, most contain tourist shops, cafes, or restaurants.
Here is a good view of the interior of one of the cone roofs.
Additionally, the cone may have a symbol painted on it. Such symbols may include Christian symbols such as a simple cross, a cross on a heart pierced by an arrow (representing Santa Maria Addolorata, i.e. Our Lady of Sorrows), a circle divided into four quarters with the letters S, C, S, D in them (for Sanctus Christus and Sanctus Dominus according to one source, but more likely, the initials of Santo Cosma and Santo Damiano, the two saints to whom the local basilica is dedicated) and quite a few others.
And there is also a "trulli church", the Chiesa di Sant'Antonio (although it is only from the 20th century).
Here you can see just how many there are!
Then we headed to the other side, which is called Aia Piccola. It was much quieter and with almost no tourists (and no tourist shops)
There is also a Basilica in town, dedicated to Saints Medici Cosma and Damiano. The neoclassical building dates back to the late 19th century when it replaced a small chapel from 1609. The façade has two bell towers, the left one with a sundial and the right one with a clock with Roman numerals. I also did a closeup of the lunette above the door and one of the panels of the bronze door.
And the trulli's are not just in Alberobello ... they are in the surrounding area as well, like this larger one out in the countryside. You can see that there are multiple domed roofs, which today would each be a room that are put together to form a home for a single family.
