Alberobello

Alberobello's name means "beautiful tree", and old records call the area simply a selva, a forest. The land was first settled only in the early 16th century, when Andrea Matteo III Acquaviva d'Aragona, Count of Conversano, allowed about forty peasant families from Noci to farm it in return for a tenth of their crops. In 1635 his successor, Count Giangirolamo II, built an inn with a tavern and an oratory and began turning the forest into a village of small houses.

The count required the houses to be built of dry stone, with no mortar. A 15th-century edict of the Kingdom of Naples, the Prammatica de Baronibus, taxed every new settlement, and buildings without mortar could be passed off as temporary and pulled down quickly, so he avoided paying the Spanish viceroy. With limestone abundant in the surrounding karst, peasants found that a round plan with a self-supporting domed roof was the simplest way to build, and the trullo became the town's form.

Alberobello remained a fief of the Acquaviva family until 27 May 1797, when King Ferdinand IV of Bourbon made it a royal city and freed it from feudal servitude; its first mayor was elected on 22 June. The surviving urban trulli date from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Many families emigrated, a large number of them to Utica in New York State. During the Second World War a farm outside the town, the Casa Rossa, was used by the Fascist government as a transit and internment camp. The trulli were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

Alberobello is the only inhabited town with an entire district of trulli and is regarded as the cultural capital of the trulli of the Itria Valley. A trullo usually has one room under each cone, with extra living space in arched alcoves. On top of each cone sits a hand-worked pinnacle — a disc, ball, cone or other shape — said to be the signature of the master builder, the trullaro. Some cones carry painted symbols, many of them Christian, such as a cross or a heart pierced by an arrow; the row of symbols on Via Monte Pertica was painted only in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The town is a place of pilgrimage as well as tourism: its patron saints, the physician martyrs Cosmas and Damian, are celebrated from 25 to 28 September at the basilica that holds their relics. In summer the town stages folk, classical and jazz music, theatre and street performances, mostly free and in the open air.

Local people have long been known for textiles, and linen is still sold in shops among the trulli. Alberobello has twinned itself with the Japanese villages of Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama, also famous for their traditional houses, and the Giro d'Italia has visited twice, finishing a stage here in 2017 and starting one in 2025.

About 10,200 people lived in the municipality in 2022, in the town and its only outlying village, Coreggia. The centre was built along the old Cana stream, whose course is now followed by Largo Martellotta, the main street. Some trulli are still homes, while many have become shops, restaurants and holiday rooms.

Tourism is now central to the economy. Most visitors are Italian, and the trulli lanes fill in the middle of the day with coach groups and day-trippers from Bari and the coast, then quieten again in the evening. Trulli settlements began to be deserted in the second half of the 20th century, and today many of those in the centre serve visitors.

Life follows the southern rhythm of a long lunch and a quiet afternoon. In summer the passeggiata, the evening stroll, continues past midnight, and the town's festivals and feasts fill the squares. The railway, opened in the first years of the 20th century, links the town with Bari and with the neighbouring towns of Noci and Locorotondo.

Alberobello eats as the Itria Valley and the province of Bari do. Orecchiette, the "little ears" of Puglia, are made from durum wheat semolina, water and salt, rarely with egg: each small piece of dough is pressed and dragged across the board with a knife, then turned over the thumb to give its hollow shape. In the Bari dialect they are often called strasc'nat, from the dragging. They have been documented around Bari since at least the 12th and 13th centuries.

The meat of the valley is the bombetta, "little bomb": a slice of pork capocollo stuffed with Apulian canestrato cheese, salt and pepper, sometimes with parsley, rolled into a bundle and cooked on the grill or in the oven. Butchers guard their own recipes, and variants come wrapped in bacon, filled with ham or spiced.

Shops in the trulli district sell local cheeses, sausages, biscuits, spreads, wine and grappa. Taralli, rings of dough shortened with olive oil or lard, are a snack common across southern Italy.