By Isla Quinn
Grey cones. UNESCO counts over 1500 structures in two quarters, each one a small house under a conical stone roof. This is Alberobello, a small town in Apulia, in the south of Italy, in the Metropolitan City of Bari.
The basics
Wikipedia’s article on the town puts it at 402.5 metres above sea level and gives its population as 10,237 as of 31 August 2022. The houses that made it famous are called trulli (one house is a trullo). The same article says they were built from dry stone, without mortar, and calls the round form with its self-supporting domed roof the simplest that peasants could build using only stone.
How a trullo stands up
The separate Wikipedia article on the trullo goes into the build. It says walls range from 0.80 metres to 2.70 metres thick, and that the height up to the start of the vault runs from 1.60 to 2 metres. The outer face leans slightly, with a batter of 3 to 5 per cent. The roof, it says, is made in two skins: an inner skin of limestone voussoirs with a closing stone, and an outer skin of limestone slabs tilted outward so that water runs off. UNESCO’s own summary uses the phrase “corbelled dry-stone construction” and says the walls are built from limestone boulders gathered from nearby fields.
On top of many cones sits a worked pinnacle. The article lists the shapes: disk, ball, cone, bowl, polyhedron, or a mix, and says they are said to be the mason’s signature. Some roofs also carry painted symbols, among them a cross and a four-quartered circle. The same article adds that symbols on one street were painted in the late twentieth century and early 2000s, during renovations. Our reading: the painted marks you see today are not all old, and the article does not say which are.
The word comes from the Greek τρούλος, meaning cupola, according to the same article.
Why dry stone? Two stories
Here the sources part ways, and we set them down side by side without choosing.
- The Alberobello article says dry stone was an expedient to avoid taxes owed to the Spanish Viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples, and links the trulli to a fifteenth-century tribute edict, the Prammatica De Baronibus.
- The trullo article calls the tax idea a “popular but unproven theory”: that heavy taxes led people to build structures that could be pulled down quickly when inspectors came. It does not name the edict.
How old are they?
Another disagreement. UNESCO says the trulli date from as early as the mid-fourteenth century. The Alberobello article says the area was first settled in the early sixteenth century under Count Andrea Matteo III Acquaviva d’Aragona. The trullo article says records from the mid-fourteenth to the late sixteenth century call the area “selva”, forest, and that evidence of dwellings before the seventeenth century is lacking. It adds that a 1704 map shows a nucleus of trulli and an 1808 map shows a pattern close to today’s, and that the surviving urban trulli date from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Its “golden age”, it says, was the nineteenth century, particularly the final decades, tied to wine growing.
Alberobello stayed a fief of the Acquaviva of Aragon until 27 May 1797, when King Ferdinand IV made it a royal city, says the Alberobello article.
Two districts
UNESCO inscribed the Trulli of Alberobello in 1996 under criteria (iii), (iv) and (v). It names two quarters: Rione Monti and Rione Aia Piccola. It gives 1,030 trulli for Monti and 590 for Aia Piccola, and says there are over 1500 structures across the two. A local site, alberobello.com, which is a promotional site for visitors, describes Monti as the largest and most famous district with about 1,000 cones and most of the souvenir and craft shops, and Aia Piccola as smaller, with about 400 cones, residential only. A second promotional page, on the Live the World site, also says about 400 for Aia Piccola and adds that most of its trulli are private homes, so interiors are generally closed to visitors.
Even UNESCO’s own page is not tidy. Its metadata lists the property at 10.52 hectares, while the description speaks of 11 hectares across six parcels. We report both.
Dates in order
- Mid-14th century: earliest date UNESCO gives for the trulli.
- Early 16th century: first settlement, according to the Alberobello article.
- 1704: a map shows a nucleus of trulli, according to the trullo article.
- 1797 (27 May): Ferdinand IV makes Alberobello a royal city, according to the Alberobello article.
- 1808: a map shows a pattern like today’s, according to the trullo article.
- 19th century: the “golden age”, according to the trullo article.
- 1996: UNESCO inscription.
What kind of sources these are
Two Wikipedia articles, which anyone can edit; the UNESCO World Heritage listing, a heritage body; and two promotional visitor pages. We have set the visitor pages beside UNESCO rather than over it.
What we left out
Admission prices, opening hours, hotel and restaurant names, restoration costs, and any claim about which painted symbol means what. No source we read gave a reliable key to the symbols, so we offer none.
Roam first. Shop later.