Trulli of Alberobello

A town of trulli: whitewashed round houses with dry-stone conical roofs, built without mortar.

Two old districts hold the most trulli: Rione Monti with about 1,030 and Rione Aia Piccola with about 590. Alberobello is the only lived-in town with a whole district of trulli, and it is seen as the cultural capital of the trulli of the Itria Valley. The name means "beautiful tree" in Italian.

How trulli are built

The farmers used the local limestone from the rocky countryside around them. Without mortar, they found that the round shape with a self-supporting domed roof was the simplest way to build.

Each ring of stones is laid a little closer to the middle until the top is closed. The roofs were decorated with small pinnacles, which stand for the signature of the master builder, called a master trullaro.

Tax story and history

People first settled here in the early sixteenth century, when Count Andrea Matteo III Acquaviva allowed about forty peasant families from Noci to farm the land. Wikipedia explains that a 15th-century law of the Kingdom of Naples taxed every new settlement.

The counts of Conversano then required that houses be built dry, so they could be seen as temporary and torn down easily. In 1797 King Ferdinand IV freed the village from the counts and made it a royal city, and it elected its first mayor that June.

Today

The town is on the list of the "most beautiful villages of Italy" as well as the UNESCO list. It is twinned with the Japanese villages of Shirakawa-go and Gokayama, which are also famous for their traditional houses.

Many people from Alberobello moved abroad in the past, and a large number settled in Utica, New York.

On the globe

The model shows white round houses with gray cone roofs packed together. Look for the cone-shaped stone roofs.