Trulli Magnificent

First Published: 16 Apr 2009

I must have visibly paled as I looked down in disbelief at the circular plastic disk. It hadn’t finished its wobble, wobble, wobble thing there on the pavement before I realized what had happened. It was me. It was my clumsy fault. Moving around in the close confines right there in the Calitri street between my car and gas pump, where I’d been forced to park close because of traffic, I’d managed to do-in the gas cap cover with an unthinking, rotating movement of my hip. Actually snapping it right off! I’d once joked that I’d been too big for a subterranean Parisian bistro, but now what, Italy to? Well, what to do? Fuget-about-it, at least for a while and hit the road to the Adriatic coast anyway!

Along with Geraldine and Antonio, members of our adopted Italian family, we were on our way first across the tomato fields of Basilicata, past Bari with its mammoth stadium named for Santa Claus, and on into the olive orchards of Puglia to our destination, Alberobello. Literally located in the spiked heel of the Italian boot, we were up for a weekend of earthy relaxation and discovery.

Alberobello, whose name originates from a grove of alberi belli (beautiful trees) that once grew in this local, is today a tourist mecca due to another, more enduring, historic presence. For it is here where you will find the Trulli. Trulli are not descendents of some ancient tribe but the name for an angled cone-roofed building made from local limestone. They consist of very thick circular stone walls with a steep dome, also of stone and usually topped with a bowling ball tipped capstone, raised up almost as an offering. These structures were originally all constructed without mortar, with a single door, maybe a window, a packed dirt floor, and astrological symbols painted on the cones to ward off evil. In addition to housing peasant families, they also served well for storage and sheltering livestock. Many may have seen pictures of them and fewer recognize the name, yet here is something ingeniously unique. They come in many varieties, almost like scoops of gelato with one, two, even sometimes grander places with four or more cones connected in imitation of a grand Tuscan villa.

I refer to them as ingenious sorts because of the story surrounding their origination. As it is told, and maybe this is just legend or at most a one-time incident thereby bestowing a smattering of truth to the story, these cone-topped structures were socially engineered long, long ago as a response to taxation! Taxation can make for strange behavior and cause people to take all sorts of unconventional actions. Remember that tea party in Boston? Way back when, as the revenue collector made his village rounds, I can imagine how word of his presence would have outpaced his movements. Lacking cell towers or telefonini, something on the order in its day of a medieval “neighborhood watch” developed! Property tax was related to whether the property was improved or unimproved. Lack of a roof was a telltale sign of abandonment or that the structure was uninhabited. Such places were taxed at a lower rate or not at all. Therein lay the key to fooling the taxman, then as now an Italian national pastime! For as the story goes, the wily villagers, on advanced warning, removed their stone roofs, some going as far as to dismantle the walls entirely leaving but a field of stone, thereby avoiding being taxed! When the revenuer departed, poof, up went the Trulli again! Indeed the structure was there in all its elements but in an invisible form. Liquid, portable, unidentifiable, todays offshore and Swiss bank accounts may be equally invisible to the modern taxman!

For as little as twenty Euros to as much as hundreds of thousands of Euros, you can own one today. The former being one of the miniature souvenir Trulli models, good for dusting, made of the same materials and to the same exacting standards as their big brothers and the kind we opted for!

We were staying in nearby Cisternino in the ‘four-coned’ vacation home of Antonio’s aunt. This is provincial Italy at its purest. You can tell from its name that this is a small community as anything in Italian with a “nino” word ending implies! Indeed, for we were in a rural farming area with field upon field bordered with waist high stone walls, much like an Irish country paddock. But unlike the Emerald Isle, here the walls separated aged olive trees whose girth could take three people holding outstretched arms to reach around and not comfortably. Towering cacti with prickly leafs as big as dinner platters and flower bulbs the size of Idaho potatoes also hinted that you “weren’t in Kansas anymore” either!

Sleeping in one is like stepping into history. Lying there, staring up at the vaulted stone dome one can conjure up romantic visions of humble 14th century peasants doing exactly the same, some sharing their space with their livestock for warmth. Romantic today, yes, but it was all but that for those earlier souls who endured a life of extreme hardship. Our modern psyche is not equipped to imagine what it must have been like. In the years following WWII they were almost completely abandoned and left to ruin. Today about 1,400 of them remain in the area.

Someone long ago must have taken heed of that voice which says, “If you build it, they will come” and we have! For Alberobello, as you might expect, is infested with tourists, we four adding but slightly to the number that day. It is doubtful that any locals actually live in the commercial center. With real estate prices for these dwelling so high and the now popular Trulli in such demand, who could resist selling? Certainly no recession here! Beautiful and scenic not withstanding, Alberobello is now a series of streets with shop after shop, a few restaurants and maybe an enoteca thrown in for balance. We found the nicest places to be on the rooftops themselves or at least the parts of the roofs where the ‘stone teepees’ morphed to join with an adjacent cone. From these vantage points, accessible from many establishments, you could take in ‘Trulliville’ in one sweeping panorama.

Conveniently, around noonish, in a moment of weakness (for who can ever be really hungry in Italy), we did indulge in lunch on the patio of ‘Il Pinnacollo’ overlooking the coned countryside. I recall the pesto ravioli filled with eggplant that Maria Elena had. Since we were close to the Adriatic, out of duty I tried the frutti di mare filled with enough seafood to populate a coral reef! Under the table umbrella, with wine, baskets of pane, the glorious entrees, the unequaled view and the dear company, it was indeed a Conde Nast moment!

We did get to soak our tootsies in the Adriatic. Frankly, it was like a scene from a Federico Fellini movie. There was a single, square, two story building with a flat fortress-like roof on a slight jetty in the barren shoreline. Water encroached it from three sides. It sat there almost like a watchtower, the lone, solitary sentinel of the beach. A man lounged in one of the upstairs windows in that white, smooth Egyptian cotton material of a classic Italian tee-shirt. He surveyed the few, middle-aged Fiats scattered about outside in the sand, hesitating longer on the occasional passing bather. You could almost see the red glow from each drag of his cigarette. A blue rowboat attached to a long rusty chain lay on the sand amidst the debris of the sea seemingly ready to shove-off. I loved that image. I now have a couple of those tee-shirts myself!

Back in peace and tranquility of the countryside at Localita Pistone #14, our borrowed Trulli, Antonio climbed a tree and tossed Maria Elena a ripened fig. We were used to seeing figs, dried and wrapped in supermarket cellophane, not like these, as juicy as an apple, juicier in fact! They had gone purple with ripeness and split open, exposing their reddish, dripping flesh, begging to be picked. We eventually returned to Calitri with a bag of the ‘most supplicant’ and made jam.

Later that evening, our only night there, we went to dinner at La Tavern da Maurizio located on Rosa Marina Beach. Thankfully, we had reservations. Even in the late hour, it was packed, but then it was a Saturday night in the late summer with undoubtedly lots of Bari city dwellers down for the weekend. We sat outside on a patio under the stars and sipped our wine as we watched a specialist fillet cooked fish and arrange plates for their final presentation. Inside, a brick-lined pizza oven shimmered with intense heat as its perspiring attendants seemingly put in wood and miraculously withdrew scrumptious pizzas! A sinfully endless buffet table of unpronounceable creations lay nearby while a waiter in a red vest, hoisting a large fish into the air from an ice tray, patiently outlined its attributes to qualify it for consumption by a patron with a forefinger to his chin apparently in need of convincing. The owner, ever the past owner still apparently very much attached to the place or very lonely now without it, came by to inquire on our impressions of our meals and chat some. Delightfully engaging, this sensuous night of sights, delicious flavors, generous conversation and smells of sea and fish was as remarkable as the Trulli, indeed Trulli magnificent.

Oh, and what about the incident with gas-cap cover, you may ask? Now there is a story I will never freely relate only to say here and now that I got it fixed later-on but not before much drama, skullduggery and incessant prayers for miraculous intervention! Though Christian, I do not see myself as an obsessive one and remain, after all, but a sinner. Today, my entreaties with respect to this incident fall into the category of prayers for forgiveness on the same order, I’m guessing, as those of the early Trulli owners busy going about reassembling their conical rooftops!

Divertiti, la vita è buono!

Paolo

For related photos, click here on Eyes Over Italy. Look for and click on a photo album entitled “Trulli”.