Day 360: Trulli of Alberobello

Up and out around 10am, heading into town. This world heritage site are limestone houses, unique to this area. They're built as either cylinders or squares, with conical roofs and very uniform colours, making them very unusual!

The town has two main districts of them, so we drove in, parked up and started wandering and filming. It's surprisingly touristy, and basically every trullo house was occupied by a souvenir shop! Apparently it's because lots of cruise ships call at the port of Bari, and this is only an hour's coach ride so it's a popular day-trip option (much better than exploring Bari for a day).

We wandered up and down the narrow streets for a while, going in and out of some of the shops, but mainly not going in as we weren't really interested in buying tourist stuff. I found it interesting that they're built with limestone because this area has no water sources - they had to build big cisterns underground to trap rainwater, and used the remaining stones to build houses.

And despite looking like "traditional" houses, most of them aren't more than a couple of hundred years old. Nobody really knows why they have the distinctive form either, though a popular theory is that the cone roof and no mortar meant it was easy to knock down (and then later rebuild) when tax inspectors came calling.

Some houses are painted with religious symbols; mainly Christian, but some Buddhist and a few pagan ones as well which was interesting. I'm not sure why, and again the "tradition" actually seemed to be pretty recent.

The other district of trulli houses on the other side of the city seemed to be much more for locals. Nobody around, no tourist shops, and actually largely deserted. Not quite as picturesque, but just as interesting to wander around. And probably a bit more atmospheric as well, without people constantly offering you the chance to step inside their shop, it's free and no obligation to buy!

Anyway. Our host had recommended a particular restaurant for lunch which we went to - sat outside in the sunshine which promptly disappeared and left us shivering! The food was great though, we both had local pasta varieties (Shandos with ricotta and tomato, mine with mushroom and sausage), followed by a meat course (Shandos had pork fillet, I had local cheese wrapped in prosciutto). Bread, a drink and coffee/fruit for 16 euros each, not too bad!

Did a little more wandering but we were basically done so headed back home and stayed in for the evening.Read more