l'avventura grande: Truly Trulli

This is a Trulli. Nowhere else in Europe except for Puglia’s Itria Valley will you find these structures. These buildings were first constructed in the late Middle Ages as storage sheds. They later became shelters for farmers to duck out of a storm and eventually became peasant homes.

In many locandi (small hamlets), whole villages of Trulli popped up. As with most things in this part of the world, Trulli have an interesting history.

When the Spanish ruled this part of Italy…beginning in the 15th century…they imposed heavy taxes on peasants’ permanent structures. Trulli were an ideal way to evade these onerous taxes (Tax evasion is now considered the Italian national pastime). When a peasant heard the Aragonese tax collector was in the area, he dismantled his house. As soon as the tax collector moved on to another village, he reconstructed it. The local duke caught on and, as punishment, prohibited the use of mortar in peasant homes.

In 1797, a local uprising chased the Aragonese duke out of the area. Almost immediately, new Trulli houses were built using mortar. It’s easy to date the construction of a Trulli by noting whether the walls have mortar or not.

Over the centuries, Trulli houses became more sophisticated, growing from one-room huts to multi-room manors. Still the basic concept remained…one stone cone over each room of the house.

The conical roofs are not large. The simple engineering design will not support anything too grand. Carol and Roger stayed in a B&B that was a multi-room house made up of several Trulli.

From our bedroom, this is what the inside of the cone looked like.

The room itself didn’t look too different from any other round bedroom you might find…though it tended to be cold and dank at night.

Those of you who have seen the “Village des Bories” in Gordes, France, might think them very similar to Trulli. There are several differences, however. Bories can be round or rectangular, while Trulli are always round. Larger Bories had multiple rooms under the same roof, while Trulli always have one room per cone.

Bories have a hole in the roof that serves as a chimney, while Trulli have a plug in the center of their roofs. Each mason who built a Trulli (as the Trulli became more sophisticated, professional masons replaced peasant farmers as the builders) put his signature-shaped plug in the roof. Experts can therefore tell by looking at the roof ornament which family of masons built which houses and the approximate date each was constructed.