An hour and a half up the road from Matera is Locorotondo, we are well and truly getting into the region of Puglia, it is apparent because of the stony ploughed fields. The fields are all fenced with low dry stone walls, made one presumes from the rubble in the fields. Look, how exciting, our first Trulli….will tell you all about those later on….
They grow alot of wheat here and beans and are known throughout Italy for their top notch olive oil. Groves of olive trees are everywhere and some are so huge and gnarly trunked, they look ancient.
Locorotondo is a small, pretty whitewashed town, it is a good base for exploring the country side from. The weather has turned bitterly cold, 9c really?! Rosie is not really prepared for this and the rain is due to arrive in torrents again over the next few days, so we had better get busy and do as much exploring as we can in the dry weather.
We have a rustic, olde world style apartment in the old town. it is a narrow three story building with a beautiful rooftop terrace and sun loungers, which we will never use because of the freezing weather, the second floor has the bedroom and kitchen, this is the view from the kitchen window below.
The ground floor has another bedroom and the bathroom, Rosie is getting used to going down steep steps to the bathroom in the middle of the night…I really do need to remember to put on my glasses though…its treacherous. The town car park is only 100 metres away and the parking is free, it was really was easy to get to and find, no probs there. Claudia, the apartments manager said we would need to move our car from the car park on Thursday night as the weekly market sets up at 0500 on Friday mornings and uses the whole car park, Yay, said Rosie, a market, we had missed all the local ones so far by not being in town on their days, Rosie is looking forward to this one. Yay, said The Operator with no joy at all, where am I allowed to park then? Anywhere round and about said Claudia, the local police don’t give out tickets on a Friday because of the market….famous last words….
Walking around the town of Locorotondo can be done in the matter of an hour…it is small, smaller than Rosie anticipated…the paths are white marble and the houses are whitewashed.
The buildings are very tall and narrow alot have front doorways up steep steps half a story up…all of the houses are occupied as their are heavy fly screens over the doorways,the doors are open to let in the air and this town is occupied by wizened octogenarians who wear aprons and scrub their steps so very vigorously every morning. Plus, they greet you every morning, and smile. The old men tug on their caps to you.
This town is one of the prettiest villages in Italy….you can get a snap shot of the potential now and then…it is nearly winter and the flowers are long dead…Rosie is sure it would be beautiful in the summer. It is a little sterile at the moment.
We drove to a small town called Alberobello, say that fast 10 times…..it is only 15 mins away and is unique in the fact that it is the only town in these parts with these unique roundish squat houses all with a conical stone roof.
These are Trulli…Believe me it is like the town was specifically built for gnomes or smurfs. It is very strange, Rosie thinks a little weird and almost creepy….
Why are the houses like this, and in this area only, no one really knows for sure, some say that back in the day the Spanish overlords of the town imposed a tax on building cement.
This area is very poor and the towns people of the day said, ‘Bugger you then’ we will build our houses without cement from the plentiful stones in our fields. The trulli are pre historic and all drystone construction, including the amazing roof. In later centurys the walls were rendered and painted white in residential ones to make them look nicer.
The trulli also have a fancy spire on top, this was an indication of status in the village and some of the roofs also have symbols painted on them, depending on the symbol these have either a religious or superstitious meaning to the house owners. Yep, there is even a Trulli church.
It was a quiet day when we wandered around here, rain was threatening and did Rosie say it was cold, it was very cold, there were no scores of people, the car parks were half empty and on some streets we were the only ones….this added to Rosie’s uneasiness. The Trulli are clustered together in the town, there are about a thousand of them, all looking similar in small higgley piggley streets.
There is a main shopping avenue selling trulli souvenirs. which are displayed outside the trulli shops. The buildings are small as is the doorway, so the shop owners try to entice you inside to look at their wears by offering to show you around their trulli, Come inside and have a look at the amazing roof construction, Come inside and have a look at the recreation of an ancient interior, or, climb onto our terrace and and have a look over the rooftops of trullis…oh, and please leave a donation if you don’t buy anything.
We wandered off the beaten track into an area that seemed to be being renovated. Alot of the travellers we encountered and spoke to in Matera asked where we were travelling to next, we said we were staying in Locorotondo…ohhh, they said in sympathy, are you not staying in a trulli in Alberobello…that’s a shame.
THANK GOD ROSIE DIDN’T BOOK A TRULLI. Most of them in the town are holiday rentals, the only people today in the town were towing wheelie suitcases heading towards their rented trulli. They were tiny, with hardly any windows and most of the tourists were standing despondently in their doorways, like the shop owners looking around for the nearest bar Rosie bets. After they had a few at the nearest bar….I hope they were able to find their trulli again….because there were streets and streets of the same looking houses to choose from.. Lucky escape.
Breakfast is included in our room rate, we go 100 metres down the road to a trendy little bar and show them our key and we get a nice start to the day.
The bar is on the edge of town, there is a lookout point across the road to a beautiful view of the area.
Next we are off to Ostuni a small town on a hill set amongst the olive groves, we take a diversion through to Masseria Brancati an olive oil producing farm. This particular farm is one of the oldest in the area and was established here during Roman times…..get this, over half of these olive trees are over 2000 years old.
Check out the gnarly trunks and supports that have been incorporated over time to help bare the weight of the trees. The trees at the moment are laden, they are very small olives and are about to be harvested in the next month and pressed into oil. This farm since its inception has always been organic and is certified as such making their oil very high quality. Rosie and The Operator rocked up to the courtyard of the estate, poked our head around the corner of an open door and asked if we could try some olive oil…now this was no random place we had selected…
…..this olive oil farm was the number one visitor attraction on Tripadvisor for Ostuni….yet it was a very much working farm, there was no shop, no tasting room….we were welcomed and shown into the office where a lovely lady with passable English told us the history of the place, explained the oil they made and what the different types are used for, told us what to look out for on the labels of oil we buy from the supermarkets back home. As she was explaining the oils we were tasting the oil on bread. What an awesome introduction to one of the most used commodities in Italian cooking…Rosie knows where she is going wrong now…off we toddled with tins and bottles of oil.
PS…The Operator picked a black olive and put it in his mouth in the carpark….chewed down on it and promptly spat it out….being an olive fan, he reckoned he had been poisoned and complained all day that the poison olive taste couldn’t get out of his mouth…we certainly never expected it to be so bad even though we know olives need to be brined.
Ostuni has a hilltop position looking over the huge plane of olive trees out to the Adriatic sea. It is a little windy here, the first stiff breeze we have really had in Italy. We wandered around the ancient town in the sun, it was small and charming and there were not alot of visitors.
On Thursday evening The Operator moved the car from the car park into a space on the road in preparation for the market the next morning. The Operator reckoned it wouldn’t even be on because of the torrential rain that was heaving from the sky. But the day dawned, grey and overcast and as we walked to breakfast the car park was transformed…mobile market vans were covering every square inch. Fruit and veges, curtains, linen, household cleaners, clothes, fish, you name it, it was there. The whole town had come out for it by the looks, it was full of old people with wheelie shopping carts. When we came back to the square at 2.15 the last van was leaving, the car park was back and it looked like a bomb went off in it, rubbish, boxes, plastic piles everywhere. The council was just moving into sweep it up and within half an hour it was back to normal again. As for the police not giving out tickets on market day….there was a traffic warden on every corner….
Tomorrow is the last week of our holiday, we are going the furthest south to Lecce. Remember the Appian Road, the ancient Roman built road that we stood on on when we went to visit the catacombs in Rome? This road ends here in Lecce, 605km from Rome.
