Alberobello

I arrived in Bari yesterday afternoon and today I left town and headed to Alberobello, just over an hour bus ride away.

Arriving in Bari and almost immediately leaving is not meant to be a negative reflection on the city. From my wandering yesterday it seems to have at least a few nice bits to it and I’ll be back mid-afternoon today.

But my plan for Bari has always been to do two or three half-day trips in the vicinity during my three and a half days based here, as there is a lot around Bari that looks interesting. The guidebook I’m using for Bari recommends some sights in the city, but not enough to occupy that much time. And if I were going somewhere to do absolutely nothing but relax, I could do better.

Bus to Alberobello

I checked Rome2Rio for travel options to Alberobello and the bus seemed to be the only sensible way to go. It said there was a bus at 9:15. The next one after that was at 10:00.

I pushed to make the 9:15. I asked at my hotel front desk where to buy tickets. I rushed there and got my ticket with about five minutes to spare.

The ticket seller told me where to get the bus. It was on the same side of the street not far away. There were a couple of buses from different companies there. The signs in their windows did didn’t say Alberobello.

I asked one of the drivers where my bus was. He said, “different company” and pointed vaguely to an empty space somewhere ahead of his bus.

There is no signage saying where you get which bus to wherever. In fact, with the exception of a few big “BUS” markings stencilled in the curb lane of the street, there was no indication that this was a bus stop. However, the couple of buses parked there gave me a clue.

9:15 came and went and I didn’t see a Arberbello bus. The ticket is to Arberbello, but not for a particular time. I could take any bus today.

I wasn’t the only lost person. As I stood on the sidewalk alternating between trying to find some information in my phone and staring at my ticket hoping some invisible-ink message would make itself apparent if I meditated on it long enough. As I did so, a woman came up to me and asked me in heavily accented English (I don’t know her native tongue) if I was the driver. I reflexively chuckled and said no.

She then asked me if this was the place for the bus for Alberobello. I answered that I hoped so.

Over the next couple of minutes a couple more people asked me if that was the place to get the bus for Alberobello. I told them about my hopes too. I thought about telling them about my dreams, but they didn’t look like they’d be interested.

I’ve never thought of myself as someone who looks like he knows anything about anything. But apparently I look like I know about buses to Alberobello. (I imagine I look that way only to other tourists. I’m sure that locals know that’s not the case after just a glance at me.)

A little after 9:30, a representative of the bus company showed up and told us the bus is at ten, but we should wait here and form a line because the bus might fill up and have to leave people behind to wait for the next bus at 10:30.

I joined the exciting line-forming activity.

The bus arrived at about 9:45 and quickly filled up. Upon filling, with me being one of the people on board, it departed early leaving behind what looked to me like at least another busload.

I guess there was no point in the bus hanging around until the scheduled departure time so the people remaining on the sidewalk could continue to look longingly at the bus they couldn’t board.

The drive out was pleasant and flat. We passed a number of farms, including, I think, olive groves, vineyards, and some fields with rows of green vegetable-looking plants. There were also a few small areas with random, uncivilized vegetation that I think experts refer to as “nature.”

About half of the cultivated trees had a profusion of off-white, pinkish blossoms. Do olive trees have off-white, pinkish blossoms? If not they were something else.

Closer to Alberobello, the landscape changed from flat to undulating, including some decent-sized hills. I didn’t see any indecent-sized hills.

Alberobello

Close to the bus stop in Alberobello, which is beside the train station, there are not ugly, but mundane, relatively low-rise buildings. That’s certainly not what the tourist hordes, and tourist individuals such as me, come to see.

By the way, albero is Italian for tree. Bello is Italian for beautiful. So Alberobello means, literally beautiful tree. There are trees around but I didn’t see one that looked like it was the beautiful tree.

I read that the town is named after a beautiful old oak forest that’s no longer there. Ah, yes. Lamenting the lost good old days. But, wait. If it’s named after a forest rather than a particular tree, shouldn’t it be Alberibellissimi? Alberi is the plural, trees. And Google Translate tells me is the appropriate plural form of beautiful is bellisimi in Italian.

But who am I, a hopeless anglophone, to correct Italian grammar and force a name change on the town? Pick a beautiful tree and say the town was named for it.

The town, or what I saw of it, is built on two long, but short, gently sloped opposing hills. The flat floor of the valley between the hills holds a long, wide, paving stone floored piazza. Restaurants and souvenir shops dot either side of the piazza. When I was there, a pianist played for the public and for tips. I enjoyed it and put a couple of euros in his container on the piazza floor.

But that still is not what the crowds come for. They come for something that’s mostly on the hill that the bus/train station isn’t on.

They, and I, come for the trulli (singular, trullo) of Alberobello. There are a few trulli scattered on the hill with the train/bus station, and one large cluster of them on that hill, but the other hill is pretty much filled with them.

Trulli are small structures that were mainly homes. Now, some of them house tourist shops, restaurants, and, I assume, B&Bs.

I read that most of the walls are made of limestone. For two reasons, I don’t know if they are. For one, most of them are heavily whitewashed, hiding the stone. For another, I’m not a geologist. I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between a limestone rock and, say, a rock of the igneous variety if a large, heavy one fell on my head from a great height. Then again, if that happened it would probably kill me so I’d no longer rue my ignorance.

It’s not the walls that make trulli distinctive. It’s their roofs. Trulli roofs are curved cones, usually with a little gewgaw at its peak. There are lots of repeats, but the gewgaws differ on different roofs. (if the plural of “hoof” is “hooves,” why isn’t the plural of “roof” “rooves?” But never mind that.)

Before I came to Alberobello I’d seen pictures of a broad swath of the hillside full of trulli. But seeing them up close, I was surprised by the construction of the roofs.

The roofs are made of stones that are maybe about a smallish forearm long and a couple of finger-widths high. The tops and bottoms of the stones are flat. I assume humans, rather than nature had more to do with creating those reasonably consistent shapes.

The stones are laid in circular rows. Each row is slightly indented from the row below to create the cone shape.

Individual trulli are interesting enough on their own, but seeing a whole wide hillside full of them is an almost magical sight. There’s a panoramic terrace a little ways up the opposing hill that provides that view.

The picture of that view that I posted above is nowhere near as impressive as it was to the naked eye. That might have been the fault of the picture-taker. There are better pictures elsewhere on the internet.

The hillside full of trulli looks less like human habitation than a really, really, really cute town for slightly taller than normal Munchkins.

Wait. Are you one of those people who are going to tell me that there is no such thing as normal Munchkins because they don’t exist and never have existed? Next you’ll tell me that Oz didn’t exist. That it was just Dorothy’s fever dream. Or that the whole thing was fiction.

You people have no grasp of the real reality. Next you’re going to tell me you don’t believe that the COVID vaccine results in the growth of a unicorn horn on your forehead, a third nostril, and a fluffy tail on your butt. Facts are facts, people. Wake up!

For a closer look at individual trulli, I preferred the cluster on the hill with the station. Each trullo is a little different, but there is a broad overarching similarity to them all. I didn’t find the trulli any better on one side over the other, but the side where there’s only a large cluster, rather than a whole hillside, is less infested with tourists.

Yes, I know, I’m part of the tourist infestation. But if I can break away from the infesting hordes and still see the good stuff, that’s what I’m going to do. One of my guidebooks recommended that trulli area specifically because it’s usually not as thickly packed with tourists. I guess it’s not a particularly popular guidebook because it was right.

A few of the trulli are open for entry for a small fee. I went into one, Trullo Sovrano, that is recommended by two of the guidebooks I have with information on Alberobello. One said it is the largest trullo in Alberobello. Both said it is unique because it’s the only trullo with two stories. Inside it’s furnished the way it would have been traditionally. On the ground floor there’s a bedroom, living room, dining room, and a large and small kitchen. There are two rooms upstairs, a guest bedroom and a room with a loom.

Lunch

I grabbed an early lunch (early for Italians, less so for me) so I could make it to the particular bus time I wanted for my return to Bari.

Upon finding a restaurant and securing a table, A small dish of olives arrived at my table before I even ordered. I took advantage of it. For my meal I had orecchiette pasta with a meat roll in tomato sauce, a mixed salad, a glass of wine. As has been usual on this trip, it was very tasty.

(Orecchiette is a usually hand-made, shell-shaped pasta native to the Puglia district of Italy. Puglia includes all of the cities and towns in the latter part of this trip, Lecce, Matera, Bari, and Alberobello.)

Bus Back to Bari

Cognizant of the multitudes left behind in Bari this morning when the ten o’clock bus left for Alberobello early and full, I got to the bus stop about 40 minutes before the scheduled departure.

Apparently, a lot of other people were cognizant of the same thing. There were already what looked like well more than a bus-load waiting in line.

I joined the line.

While waiting, I overheard some people talking. One said that her family were among the people left behind by the full “10:00” bus. But the bus company sent not just one, but three additional buses to mop up the overflow. I dialled my worrying back from a level eight to a six.

A bus arrived well before the appointed departure time. It unloaded its passengers, the driver took a brief break, and then they started loading the bus again.

Unlike this morning, when they didn’t allow people to stand on the bus, this time they loaded the aisle as densely as they could with standees. If one of them fell, they’d all fall.

From what I saw through the window of the bus, I don’t think there were many molecules separating each standee. I didn’t have a measuring device capable of verifying it, but if I did I think I’d be able to confirm that there were no more than 28 molecules between each person; 30 tops.

I wasn’t one of the people on the bus, standing or sitting. There were just five people ahead of me when an employee of the bus company standing at the door of the bus held up his hand in the universal halt signal and said just, “next bus.”

Just to be clear, that’s exactly what he said. He said it in English and only English. I guess he figured that everyone taking the bus from Alberobello must be a tourist. And English is the lingua franc of tourists.

I asked him when the next bus was. He replied, “five minutes.” In fairness, I thought I detected a lilt in his voice indicating he was not entirely certain. It was about 20 minutes.

The seats of my bus were full, but they didn’t pack the aisle as completely as on the previous bus.

The bus didn’t leave much beyond the appointed time. However, unlike the bus this morning, which didn’t make any stops other than for things like traffic lights, this one did. The driver let some people off and others on at a couple of stops.

I got back to Bari late enough that I wouldn’t have much time to do stuff to put in a second post today, but not nothing. See you then.