Entrance Tickets – The Trulli House Museum in Alberobello

On account of the thousand or so Trulli houses and because it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site Alberobello is vulnerable to severe tourist overload so Kim’s plan was to get up early to beat the crowds and go and get some photographs of empty streets

We debated this before lights out and I suggested seven o’clock and Kim said six which I said was too early, so we agreed on seven and Kim set the alarm for six!

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Early Bird – Avoiding the Crowds (2)

On account of the thousand or so Trulli houses and because it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site Alberobello is vulnerable to severe tourist overload so Kim’s plan was to get up early to beat the crowds and go and get some photographs of empty streets

We debated this before lights out and I suggested seven o’clock and Kim said six which I said was too early, so we agreed on seven and Kim set the alarm for six! Which was too early because it was still dark so we turned off the alarm, went back to sleep and woke at about eight; a perfect compromise.

Read the full story…

Entrance Tickets – The Trulli House Museum in Alberobello

On account of the thousand or so Trulli houses and because it is a UNESCOWorld Heritage Site Alberobello is vulnerable to severe tourist overload so Kim’s plan was to get up early to beat the crowds and go and get some photographs of empty streets

We debated this before lights out and I suggested seven o’clock and Kim said six which I said was too early, so we agreed on seven and Kim set the alarm for six!

Read the full story…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Room

Trulli House – Alborobello, Puglia, Italy

Trulli houses are unique to this area of Italy, they are rather like an igloo with a conical roof and a single windowless room inside with shallow alcoves for bedrooms and storage.

Where they first came from is a matter of some debate. One theory is that since Trulli can be built up and pulled down in a hurry, in past centuries their owners would demolish their own buildings whenever the tax man came to town to assess property duty, and then rebuild them when he had moved on.  Interesting but that seems unlikely to me, it seems an awful lot of trouble to go to just to avoid a few pence in tax!

When one house became too small, the owner would just stick up another one next door, and knock the walls through – repeating the process whenever more space was needed.

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Italy and Puglia, Driving and Rain

Simply because we had a hire car we felt obliged to use it even though my personal preference would have been to leave it in its safe little parking spot close to the Trulli house where we were staying and just waste the day away in the tourist town of Alberobello.

I wasn’t really sure where to go, I didn’t want to drive too far and yesterday the places that we had visited had been rather disappointing so without a real plan we headed out of the town and made for the naval city of Taranto on the other side of the heel of Italy’s boot but with an idea that we might stop off in Mottola and Massafra, two towns that both featured in the guide books.

First we drove to the nearby town of Noci which was reasonably straight forward and we rather enjoyed driving through the countryside and along narrow roads with verges decorated with pretty wild flowers and next to fields of grazing cows and the inevitable olive groves twisting away as though in a Chubby Checker dancing competition but this all changed for the worst when we arrived in Mottola and the minor road came to a sudden end and we were obliged to join a main road.  I say main road only because it was marked in red on the map but the standard of maintenance was no better and now we had to share the tarmac and the potholes with hundreds of demented Italian drivers.

Perched on a hillside Mottola didn’t look anything special so we rather unfairly wrote it off as not worth stopping for and we carried on to Massafra where the driving deteriorated even further where I swear the drivers were all competing in some sort of scrap-heap challenge.  Caught up in the flow of speeding traffic I was terrified by the narrow lanes, the closeness of the steel barriers at the side of the road and just how close people were prepared to drive to the rear end of our car.

At every junction I had an expectation of a collision – at a roundabout I showed some hesitation and a twenty tonne truck just cut straight across me, missing me by inches!  I realised by now that stop signs are completely meaningless as, on approaching one, an Italian driver just ignores it and simply pushes the front of his car into the flow of traffic while he continues to chat away on his mobile phone.

My nerves were in shreds and it was in the middle of all this mayhem that Kim confessed that she was feeling rather stressed as well so we both agreed that probably the best idea was to abandon any ideas of visiting Massafra and the planned trip to Taranto (there was still fifty kilometres to go), turn around and go directly back to Alberobello.  Luckily this meant that we could leave the main highway and get back onto the country roads which although tricky and at times dangerous were thankfully not completely murderous.

Incidentally if anyone has been to Mottola or Massafra can you let me know if I missed anything by not stopping off?

I was so pleased to get back  to Alberobello and park the car in a safe place where it was now going to stay until tomorrow morning when happily we would be returning it to the Sixt car rental office in Ostuni.  You have probably guessed this already but I didn’t enjoy driving in Italy and it will be a very long time before I do it again!

While we had been driving and concentrating on the roads and staying alive we hadn’t taken much notice of the weather but now we could see that it had become horribly grey and soon after arriving back it started to rain, gently at first but then turned into a real down pour that kept us confined to the room for a couple of hours.  This was reminiscent of childhood holidays in Wales where it always rains and where as bored children we spent hours staring out of the door looking for weather improvement and watching raindrops racing down the windows of the holiday chalet.

Thankfully we had a nice room in Alberobello in Italy and not a damp holiday chalet in Wales.

Eventually the rain finally cleared away, the sky brightened, the sun came up and the streets quickly dried so released from confinement we had one last walk around the Trulli houses but to be honest there are only so many times that you can walk around the same streets and we had had enough of Alberobello by the end of the fourth day and we looked forward to moving on again tomorrow.

 

Italy and Puglia, Yours Trulli in Alberobello

On account of the thousand or so Trulli houses and because it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site Alberobello is vulnerable to severe tourist overload so Kim’s plan was to get up early to beat the crowds and go and get some photographs of empty streets

We debated this before lights out and I suggested seven o’clock and Kim said six which I said was too early, so we agreed on seven and Kim set the alarm for six!

Which was too early because it was still dark so we turned off the alarm, went back to sleep and woke at about eight; a perfect compromise. Once awake and dressed we left the Trulli and walked into the town up and down the lateral streets and around and around the looping alleys and lanes.  It was rather cloudy but we still managed to get the pictures that we wanted and then went to the Truli Holidays reception and breakfast room for the first meal of the day which turned out to be exceptionally good and only the same price as the Nonna Isa which only served to open up recent wounds.

Kim now decided that she needed some face cream for dry skin so, because I didn’t want to drive, I volunteered to walk to the supermarket that we had driven past on the way in the day before and she went back to the room.  The problem with going on foot back to somewhere that you passed in the car is that distances can be very deceptive and although it had been only a couple of minutes the first time it now took me a good half-an-hour to get to it and then it didn’t sell face cream anyway (well, not the sort Kim wanted) so I bought some bottles of Peroni instead then took the long walk back just as the temperature began to rise.

Kim was sitting outside the Trulli so I opened a Peroni and joined her.  Although our accommodation had been restored and modernised to make it suitable for holiday accommodation it was a genuine traditional house with whitewashed walls and a stone roof and there was a framed photograph inside that was eighty years old to prove it.  Trulli houses are unique to this area of Italy, they are rather like an igloo with a conical roof and a single windowless room inside with shallow alcoves for bedrooms and storage.

Where they first came from is a matter of some debate. One theory is that since Trulli can be built up and pulled down in a hurry, in past centuries their owners would demolish their own buildings whenever the tax man came to town to assess property duty, and then rebuild them when he had moved on.

When one house became too small, the owner would just stick up another one next door, and knock the walls through – repeating the process whenever more space was needed. It makes the larger clusters look like a scale model of St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow that has been built by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.

At about midday we did another lap of the town, had a drink in the main square, found a mini market and bought some  Parma ham, cheese and fresh bread for lunch and then Kim found a pharmacy and bought the face cream she couldn’t manage without which cost a massive €25!  Now, for €25 I would expect to get a bucket full but it was only the tiniest little tube so when we got back to the Trulli I went for a lie down and a bottle of beer, which for comparison purposes cost only €1.30 for half a litre.

The cost of the hire car was also a waste of money today because, to be honest, I couldn’t really face driving it again so we left it parked up all day while we sat about the Trulli as tourists continually wandered past taking snapshots and after an hour or so I was beginning to understand what it must be like to live in Bourton-On-The Water or in Williamsburg.

So many people came by and admired the exterior of our Trulli house that eventually Kim began to offer guided tours and during the afternoon we showed around some Australians from Melbourne, a German couple from Frankfurt and a Japanese family from Tokyo and I think we were missing a revenue earning opportunity there that might have offset the cost of the face cream because just around the corner a local couple were charging people for a peek inside a genuine Trulli house.

Eventually we tired of the tourist attention and walked to the new town for a change and visited the large cathedral and the surrounding streets where traditional Trullis were randomly tucked in between modern concrete apartments and shops and then on the way back I visited the Trulli museum but Kim turned down this fascinating opportunity and went back to sit outside in an exhibitionist sort of way whilst passing tourists took her photograph.  After the museum visit I joined her and we spent the rest of the afternoon and the early evening in the sun splashed street and then watched as it went down over our shoulders and left just a fleeting sunset as it sank like a stone in the west.

There was no debate to be had about tonight’s choice of place to eat – we had enjoyed last night that we both knew that we would be returning there and as it turned dark we walked away in the direction of the restaurant that had already become our preferred choice.  This is silly I know but once we find somewhere we like we get in the habit of going back even though there are others to choose from.  Once in Barcelona we went to the same place four nights running and I think we had paella every night as well (different varieties of course).

Well, the place didn’t let us down and we had a second excellent meal.