Alberobello Geography

Alberobello sits inland on the Murgia, the limestone tableland that forms the spine of Puglia, and the rock under it explains both the trulli and the farming around them.

The Valle d'Itria

The town stands at roughly 430 metres on the edge of a shallow karst basin known as the Valle d'Itria, shared with Locorotondo, Martina Franca and Cisternino. It is not a valley cut by a river — there is no river — but a broad depression in the plateau, and it is dotted with trulli and low farmsteads rather than concentrated villages.

Stone everywhere

The limestone lies close to the surface and breaks naturally into flat slabs. Clearing a field here means lifting stone, and the stone lifted has to go somewhere: into the dry walls that divide every plot, and into the buildings. The trulli are, in the most literal sense, made of the fields they stand in.

Water

Rain drains straight through the rock, so there are no surface streams and never were. Every traditional house here is built over its own cistern, fed from the roof, and that dependence on stored rainwater shaped where and how people could live.

Terra rossa

What soil there is sits in pockets between the rock as a thin red clay, iron-rich and fertile enough for vines, olives, almonds and figs. The Valle d'Itria's white wines, from Verdeca and Bianco d'Alessano grapes, come off exactly this ground.

What the karst hides

Ten kilometres north, at Castellana, the same limestone opens into one of the largest cave systems in Italy, three kilometres of galleries and a chamber hung with white alabaster formations. It is the clearest demonstration available of where the rain that never runs off here actually goes.

Between two seas

The Adriatic is about thirty-five kilometres north-east at Monopoli, the Ionian roughly forty south-west towards Taranto.