Before I start, trulli are conical roof homes made out of stone. This is what I will be talking about. A trullo is a singular home and a trulli is more than one.

A trullo is a limestone dwelling found in southern Puglia. For those of you who don’t know (and I didn’t before I came here) the “g” in Puglia is silent. And the Italians think English is hard? For 2 weeks Nino has been trying to teach us to say thank you in Italian (grazie). For most of the time when we thought we were saying thank you in Italian correctly we were really saying the name “Grace”. This morning at breakfast the owner of the Bed and Breakfast gave us a lesson on what to do with our teeth and tongue when we say “grazie.” Now we are all so paranoid that we will say it wrong we now just say thank you in English. However, we are very good with the word “prego”, a word that seems to be appropriate to use at anytime or any situation. Back to the trullo. The word trullo means a single dwelling and the word trulli means many dwellings.

A trullo is a traditional dry stone hut with a conical roof. They are specific to the Alberobello area of Puglia. They were generally constructed as temporary field structures and storehouses or as permanent dwellings by small proprietors or agricultural laborers in Alberobello. The history of them are varied and include the theory that they could be dismantled quickly when the tax collector came. This kind of architecture dates back to the 17th century. Trulli is traditionally built using dry stone masonry (without mortar or cement). The roofs were made in this shape to collect rainwater. It took 2 months to build a trullo. A wooden cone structure was made for the roof and the stones were stacked around it. When finished they removed the wooden frame and moved on to the next roof. Below are pictures of the inside of an original trullo.

As the trulli village has been named a world UNESCO site since 1996 no changes can be made to the outside of the building but many of them have been turned into high end bed and breakfasts.

After a little retail therapy we drove to a cheese farm to watch the process of making cheese from milking the cow to eating the finished product. Thank goodness there was no haz-mat suit for this adventure.

I can’t say that I had a lot of interest in the making of mozzarella, ricotta or burrata cheese because I don’t eat them. The smell was pretty bad so Teri and I went outside. Lunch was good even without eating all that cheese.

When we returned to Martina Franca we stopped at Palazzo Ducale that is basically a section of City Hall that is filled with beautiful frescos and Murano glass chandeliers. It was breathtaking and free!

Then off to dinner to another restaurant that Nino recommended. None of these restaurants open before 7:30.

Tomorrow we are off to Trani and the final stop of this portion of the tour. Sad, sad, sad.