The journey to Alberobello, which is situated just above the heel of Italy, was through an agricultural smorgasbord of produce. It is clearly a wine making region and we’ve driven through French, Spanish and Portuguese wine regions. None of them seemed to have such rich, fat, heavy grapes. I appreciate that it was a few weeks earlier and that we are here at harvest time but it really looked like the grapes were too heavy for the vines. They are growing under shades, from the top all you can see are miles and miles of white fields but underneath the grapes hang rich and corpulent waiting to be pressed, we passed tractors with skips piled high on their way to the shiny factories along the road, we shall buy some wine before we leave.
Alberobello itself is a wonder, in the fields for a few miles outside the city there are, dotted about, these tiny buildings with pointy domed roofs, like little fairy houses hiding in the trees. I love tiny things and these houses were gorgeous!
They are Trulli and only found in this area of Italy. We found our campsite and settled down for the evening. There was a ‘shuttle bus’, someone drove us in an old car with a bottle of something on the floor by my feet, could have been petrol or piss, I wasn’t too sure, anyway we arrived armed with a map and found a whole town of fairy houses.
To get to the trulli we walked through the new part of town which had the most unnecessarily ostentatious church with pillars and statues galore. (There are saints and some of them very grumpy looking on every corner in Italy, there was even a massive Jesus blessing a petrol station on the motorway.) We walked up a very steep hill along tiny roads not wide enough for a car, even a fiat. People live in the houses and some of the roads were tastefully blocked off and marked private. One of the houses was open, decorated as it had been left in the 1950’s, I went in, it was more like a cave inside, very cool and without any windows, only a tiny arrow slit size gap with gauze across. The furniture was more like the victorian open air museum houses in Birmingham than 1950’s, they are so small, this one had three rooms, a kitchen/living and two bedrooms but they were tiny, even by the standards of someone living in a van. R decided that we could build one as a pizza oven in the garden, I did point out that we don’t have a garden.
We had an enormous pizza each for lunch and then hand made ice-cream, amaretto for me strawberry for R, I think he was disappointed that it was just mushed up strawberries, no artificial anything and no alcohol.
A brilliant place and only thanks to our hitchhiker that we visited!