5 April 2024 – Ostuni & Alberobello
Miles driven today = 33
Total Miles to date = 3,392
We’ve had a busy old day today. We started by driving just a few kilometres inland from our coastal parking spot and got ourselves parked up under the big wheel at Ostuni.
The town has been around since Greco/Roman times. It’s spread over 3 hills with the oldest part on the tallest of these. We made our way to the Piazza della Liberta with the Church of St Francis of Assisi on the right here.
The Piazza is also known as Piazza St Oronzo. He’s the fellow standing up there on top of his 21 metre high pillar.
We started to climb up the main thoroughfare into the old town, lined with tourist shops. A little later Lisa bought herself a very colourful long shirt, which will no doubt see good use on this year’s festival outings. A bargain at €10!
Ostuni is known as the “White City” due to the liberal amount of whitewash used to paint its buildings.
It reminded us very much of the white painted hill towns we visited when we took the van down to Southern Spain a couple of years ago.
There are a series of narrow alleyways which run roughly in concentric circles around the hill.
These are joined by zig-zagging staircases running up and down the hillside.
We got a bit confused (again). I asked Lisa to “stand there and look perplexed” for the camera. She duly obliged.
The whole place was really atmospheric and you could imagine how life might have been here before it became such a magnet for tourists.
There were also some great views to be had out over the surrounding olive groves with the coast beyond.
We dodged the tour parties towards the top of the hill where the 15th Century Gothic Cathedral stands.
The Scoppa Arch is named after the Bishop who oversaw its rebuilding after the original was destroyed in an earthquake in 1743.
We popped in to see a contemporary art exhibition which had some very interesting paintings and sculptures.
I particularly liked this one of a pair of drinking buddies. I have more than a few friends who I could easily place in this scenario.
This deconsecrated Church is now an archeological museum.
We popped inside for a look around and found all sorts of interesting artefacts in the main body of the Church and half a dozen ante rooms.
Ancient oil lamps.
Painted ceramics dated back as far as the 5th Century BC.
The museum’s prize exhibit is “Delia”. A young lady who was aged between 18 and 20 and was buried with her unborn child 28,000 years ago. This is actually a cast of how the skeletons were uncovered.
These are the actual bones kept in a glass case.
There is also a holographic presentation in Italian with a woman acting as Delia, telling of her life and times.
How extravagant are we? Out for lunch twice within the space of 3 days. This is a “white” pizza, which basically means no tomato sauce, although there were loads of tomatoes buried underneath all the other stuff. We both ordered the “fico” but figs are out of season at the moment so they were substituted with pears. They were really good but the photo doesn’t do justice to how much food was there. We both struggled and I’m never usually one to leave food on my plate.
We rolled back down the hill to the van and drove on for 45 minutes to Alberobello. We got ourselves parked up in the town’s only sosta and walked the short distance to the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the middle of the town.
If you’ve been paying attention you’ll remember the trullo (trulli plural) I took a picture of the other day. Well round here there are thousands of them. We saw loads out in the countryside as we drove here and there are no less than 1,500 in Alberobello alone.
From the main central thoroughfare it is very easy to find your way up a little side street and into a different world of these traditional beehive shaped houses.
The people who built these trulli must have either been very short or they constantly walked around with bumps on their heads. Lisa for scale.
Obviously the place is a big tourist draw and we probably saw more in the way of tour parties here than we have anywhere on this trip. A lot of the trulli have therefore been converted into gift shops.
These ones have “magic symbols” on the roof. If you go in the shop opposite the lady there will explain what the symbols mean and then try to flog you all sorts of related tat.
The trulli extend uphill from both sides of the central piazza.
We managed to find some which looked a lot more authentic and how you would have imagined them to have appeared in days of yore.
You can rent these, if you fancy staying in your own little hobbit home for a weekend.
This is Casa Lippolis, named after the priest who used to live here. Photos on the information board showed the dilapidated state that this and a lot of the other surrounding trulli were in before UNESCO moved in and saved the day.
We popped into another museum so that we could experience what it was like inside the trulli. Even with the online audioguide it was a bit dry but I did like these examples of various topping stones which sit at the point of the trulii’s roofs.
The temperature inside was remarkably cool and the acoustics in the circular rooms were very weird.
Some of the taller rooms had a wooden ceiling which presumably allowed for storage or possibly even additional sleeping room.
Something has been missing in our lives. Although we are both now in our 60s, neither of us has ever tasted an Aperol Spritz… until today. I could have been very easily tempted into having another if they weren’t €10 a pop! So we went back to the van and raided our own wine and beer supplies, which I am afraid have resulted in today's update taking a lot longer to publish than it should have. I hope it all still makes sense in the morning!
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