Alberobello is a small town and comune of the Metropolitan
City of Bari, Apulia, southern Italy. It has about 11,000
inhabitants and is famous for its unique trulli
buildings
A trullo is a small dwelling built from the local
limestone, with dry-stone walls and a characteristic conical roof.
It is a traditional and simple type of structure which you'll see
dotted around this part of Puglia, sometimes in its most basic form
used as a kind of shed among the olive groves. The story behind
Alberobello, once a town of trulli alone, is a typically
Italian one: its design was to fiddle taxes and fool the
authorities. The local feudal lord, Count Acquaviva, moved his
peasant workers here to clear woodland and cultivate the land. To
wriggle around laws and taxes, it was important that Alberobello
didn't class as an inhabited settlement. So until 1797, when
Alberobello was finally given 'town' status, the people had to live
in trulli, which could be dismantled in a hurry when
necessary.
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.
