My latest discovery: the trullo.

I want to live some day like a 17th century peasant. Happy. In a pleasant abode called a trullo. Out in the country. Where I could till the fields. Pick apples from the orchard. And tend sheep. Every evening, I’d retire to my trullo. I stayed in a Trullo. Last week. With my Italian true love. In Alberobello. A small town (11,000 inhabitants) in the province of Bari. In the region of Puglia. In the south of Italy. Peasants used to live in trulli. Cozy hut-like shelters. With cone-shaped roofs of sandstone slabs. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. For a picture, go to google. Do a search for trulli. A stonemason specializing in the building of trulli is a trullisto or trullaro in Italian. The trullo is making a comeback. Especially in Alberobello. Hundreds of ‘em. The trullo is essentially a rural building type. With its thick walls and its inability to form multi-storey structures, it is wasteful of ground space and consequently ill-suited to high density settlement, I’m told. However, being constructed of small stones, it has a flexibility and adaptability of form which are most helpful in tight urban situations. In the countryside, trullo domes were built singly or in groups of up to five, or sometimes in large farmyard clusters of a dozen or two dozen, but never for the occupancy of more than a single rural family. In Alberobello atop a trullo's cone there is normally a hand-worked sandstone pinnacle (pinnacolo), that may be one of many designs - disk, ball, cone, bowl, polyhedron, or a combination thereof, and is supposed to be the signature of the stonemason who built the trullo. Can you tell? I’m turned on by the trullo. My latest discovery. In my exploration of the Italian way of life. –Jim Broede