I was so exhausted last night I was completely unable to do anything after dinner except go to sleep, so only managed to write up the first half of yesterday's visit. We climbed up and down so many flights of stairs and walked up and down so many hills I was completely finished!
After we had paid out brief visit to Matera, we had a quick lunch and got back on the bus to drive to Alberobello. This town is famous for the Trulli, little round buildings with steep conical roofs like witches hats. You will see the odd Trullo dotted all around this area, but Alberobello has 1500 of them. They are quickly built of the local stone without using mortar - a sort of house made out of drystone walls. The story is that the local landowners forced the peasants to live in them so that, when the tax collectors came, the houses could be quickly disassembled so the landlord was not assessed for as much as he might have been had there been more houses. The Trulli could be quickly built again after the tax collector had left.
This is a whole street of them - now mostly souvenir shops.
Some of them have rather strange symbols painted on the roofs, for good luck, apparently.
Some of the ones above are still being used as homes, others have been converted into hotels or bed and breakfasts. In order to enlarge them, all you did was make a hole in one part of the wall and then build on another one.
Many of them are so smart and plastered inside it is hard to see how they were originally built, but I did find one with a less smart interior.
You have to try and ignore the rather strange things being sold in this shop, and just look at the stones in the roof.
Sometimes there were little gardens between the Trulli.
If this hasn't posted too small, you may notice something green fixed on the trunk of the old tree. It's actually an old water pump. Presumably there would have been a cistern below. No extra water was needed on the afternoon we were there - the rain started coming down in torrents just after I took this photo!
It is also possible to build Trulli of more than one storey, as shown by the Trulli church.
I suspect, however, that more traditional building methods were used for the walls, and only the Trulli style for the roofs.
We were fortunate that there wasn't too much rain until the very end of our visit to Alberobello, but we got very wet indeed while waiting for the shuttle bus to take us back to the car park where the coaches have to be left. I got very cold and the resulting tiredness from all the stairs and hills in Matera and then the hills and the heavy rain in Alberobello and the two long coach trips meant I was too tired to finish this post last night!
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