Alberobello Events

The Alberobello year turns on one major feast, with a strong secondary season at Christmas.

Santi Medici Cosma e Damiano

The patronal feast falls on 26 to 28 September and is the town's own occasion rather than a visitor attraction. The streets are hung with luminarie, the illuminated arches that are a Puglian craft in their own right; there are processions with the saints' statues, a funfair, bands and fireworks. Cosmas and Damian were physician brothers martyred in the third century and are invoked for healing, and the feast still draws people from the surrounding countryside.

Christmas

From early December the trulli of Rione Monti are lit and a nativity route is laid out through the quarter, sometimes with living nativity scenes staged in the cones. It is the one period outside summer when the town is genuinely busy, and the cones under lights are a better sight than the description suggests.

Easter

Holy Week processions, small and local.

Summer in the valley

Alberobello itself puts on concerts and open-air events in the squares through July and August, but the bigger draw is next door. The Festival della Valle d'Itria at Martina Franca, twenty minutes away, has staged opera in the courtyard of the seventeenth-century ducal palace since 1975 and has built a reputation for reviving neglected works rather than recycling the standard repertoire. It runs from mid-July into early August, and tickets go well in advance.

Locorotondo and Cisternino run their own summer music and food nights, so between them the valley has something on most evenings of the season.