Nope! Not A Movie Set ~ Enchanting Alberobello

Enchanted places cannot be created, they can only be discovered.” - ― Jerry Spinelli

Alberobello, with its famous conical stone houses, is a unique place in the world. To be honest I knew next to nothing about Puglia or Trulli before I visited. A friend signed me up for a tour to the Amalfi Coast which wound it’s way through meandering country roads in Italy before we wound up on the Amalfi Coast.

We actually met in Rome but Puglia was our first stop where we got to explore besides Alberobello the towns of Lecce and Bari before we worked our way across the bottom of the Italian Peninsula to Sassi De Matera, Naples and onto Sorrento which was the base for our time on the Amalfi Coast. This trip more than any other gave us a deep insight into the fact that Italy is more than Rome, Florence, Venice and the Amalfi Coast.

As you look over the town of the  1,500 conical white houses that make the city of Alberobello, It feels like you are looking at a Disney movie set or you’ll see hobbits come venturing out of these quaint houses. The houses are built of stacked stones without mortar and crowned with conical roofs that are easily dismantled called trulli (or single trullo).

It seems like an enchanted place, where time seems to have stopped. While it is possible to stay in an Trullo, we actually stayed in a nearby resort and toured the village, it’s quaint church and tourist shop and stopped to taste the fabulous wines that are produced in the region.

It is said that the trulli were used to evade the collection of taxes. When the tax collectors arrived in the city, the villagers dismantled the conical roofs, removing the key stone from above. The house seemed to be just a simple deposit, not subjectable to taxes. Once the tax collectors had gone, the roofs were rebuilt and the trullo returned to their livable form.

We were there in early September but the flowers bloomed every where adding to the charm and enchantment.

Let’s not forget memorabilia to take home with us. We spent a pleasant few hours browsing through the typical tourist offerings and some wonderful handmade goods from the region.

The church in this town is interestingly different. From a stylistic point of view, the church is built using the same technique as trullo, with Romanesque elements. The façade is dominated by a rose and by three spandrels along which runs a sequence of hanging archlets, very similar to the decoration of the Romanesque churches of the Puglia region.
The central dome soars high up and the skylight accentuates it even further around which revolve four small domes crowned by pinnacles. On the right hand side of the façade soars the trullo-inspired bell tower enveloped in its cylindrical body placed just slightly lower than the central dome.
The monumental entrance leads to a central layout very somber chamber where one is captured by the simplicity and refinery of the raw stone. The only touch of color is visible on the wall of the high altar, completely covered by a fresco dating back to the 20th century depicting Christ surrounded by saints.

The heel of Italy is one of the largest producers of wine in Italy thanks to the fertile soil and Mediterranean climate. Clearly a trip here would be incomplete without tasting some of these wines.

To round off our trip to this region, we ate a delicious farm to table meal at a local farm where dinner was an unexpected feast of treats lovingly prepared by the ladies of the family. There is no set menu and food and wine just arrived at the table until we were all groaning at our full stomachs and singing happy songs. The fact that it happened to be my birthday added to my personal enjoyment of this day.