The Trulli of Alberobello: A Day Trip from Lecce

Some places photograph so well that the real thing risks disappointment. Alberobello is not one of them. The town's cone-roofed trulli — more than a thousand of them, gathered on two low hills — are stranger, smaller and more moving in person than any picture suggests, and they make one of the finest day trips from Lecce.

A trullo is a drystone house of local limestone, built without mortar, its roof corbelled into a grey cone and often painted with a white symbol whose meaning has been argued over for generations. The technique is ancient; legend says the houses were built to be dismantled quickly when the tax inspector approached. Whatever the truth, the result is a form of architecture found nowhere else in Europe, and since 1996 Alberobello has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The drive from Lecce takes about an hour and a half, most of it on fast, straight roads north through olive country. Leave early: Alberobello belongs to coach tours by eleven, but at nine in the morning the lanes are quiet, the light is low and sharp on the whitewash, and parking near the centre is simple. The town itself asks for two to three unhurried hours.

There are two historic districts. Rione Monti is the famous one — a thousand trulli stacked up a hillside, many now shops and tasting rooms; climb to the top for the view back across the roofs. Then cross to Aia Piccola, the quieter quarter, where some four hundred trulli are still simply homes: washing lines, potted basil, doors open to the dark cool interiors. It is here that the town stops being a postcard and becomes a place.

Return slowly through the Valle d'Itria, a landscape of vineyards, dry-stone walls and scattered trulli. Locorotondo, with its perfectly white circular centre, and Cisternino, where butchers grill your meat over coals the moment you choose it, both merit a stop. You will be back in Lecce for the evening passeggiata — and the suites at Porta San Biagio are a short walk from where it flows.