Puglia (Italy)

Our trullo, near Alberobello

The local countryside - our trullo is in the background

 

Gotta drive a Fiat in Italy ...

 

Prickly pear in our garden - apparently you can eat the fruit, after picking and peeling it very carefully. We weren't game!

Trulli galore in the UNESCO-listed town of Alberobello, just a few kilometres from our own trullo

 

Edie: "I think they look like biscuit jars. They have flat stones piled on each other for a roof with no concrete. The walls are made of cementy stuff."



We were in town for the festival of saints Cosma and Damiano Medici.
Edie: "There were heaps of lights everywhere. They were very pretty. There was a band playing in a bandstand. It was very good music. Then we walked down the street a bit and found some rides. (...) At midnight, Dad woke me up and I saw lots of amazing fireworks!"

 

Exploring nearby Locorotondo - as Della said, "ANOTHER pretty old town with narrow, winding streets."

  

 

Jen:

It had been difficult to settle on one region of Italy to visit. Matthew and I had been to several beautiful places in Italy before, and it had been tempting to return to them with the girls on this trip. But we’re glad we decided to focus this time on a new region for us – Puglia, at the heel of the Italian boot.

We stayed for a week in a ‘trullo’ near Alberobello. A trullo is a 16th Century conical-roofed stone house - like nothing we'd seen anywhere else. A single trullo is not very big and generally constitutes one part of a house these days – in our case, the conical roof was over our dining area.

The food in Puglia was great, even for self-catering - the deli section of an Italian supermarket is something else.

I really enjoyed using my schoolgirl + night class Italian, which came back OK despite being in mothballs for 10 or so years. Certainly more than my schoolgirl French did!

Edie:

I liked staying in a trullo, and especially since it had a pool! All the streets looked the same! White, cobbled, very narrow! There was also a lot of plants. In the country, there were even cacti! I really liked the light festival thingy. There were also a lot of children's rides, including dodgems, bull riding, carousels. I went on the dodgems by myself, and it was really cool. I loved bumping into people, and whizzing round everywhere! Della and I loved stuffing ourselves with pasta!

From Della’s journal (23 September):

Today we went to a little down with trullis. It was like a maze! There were corners and turns. We stopped at a café for lunch and I had pasta, chinotto and a chocolate sorbet.

Trullis are houses with a main circle and then it goes up. It gets narrower and at the top it’s got sort of a big round blob.