Alberobello historical timeline

Alberobello is a young town by Italian standards, and the circumstances of its founding are the reason it looks the way it does.

The wood

The name comes from the medieval Latin silva arboris belli, the wood of the tree of war, which is what this stretch of the Murgia was before it was cleared. Settlement proper began in the sixteenth century, when the Acquaviva counts of Conversano moved peasant families here to work the land.

A town that could not be built

Under the Kingdom of Naples a feudal lord could not found a new settlement without royal licence, which brought taxation and royal oversight with it. The story told throughout the town is that the counts therefore required the houses to be built dry, without mortar, so that they could be pulled down quickly whenever an inspection was coming, leaving nothing that counted as a town. It is repeated everywhere, including by the town itself.

It should be treated as tradition rather than established fact. Corbelled dry-stone building is the ordinary vernacular across the whole Murgia, including in places with no such motive, and historians are correspondingly cautious. The story is worth knowing; it is not worth believing uncritically.

1797

A delegation of townspeople petitioned Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, and in 1797 Alberobello was made a royal town, released from Acquaviva rule. Building in mortar became legal, which is why the modern centre between the two trulli districts looks like an ordinary southern town.

Modern

UNESCO inscribed the trulli in 1996, and tourism has been the dominant economy since.