Alberobello. What’s So Special About This Little Italian Town?
The name seems to mean one thing, but if one digs deeper…
Alberobello is a small town in Southern Italy (Puglia) that very few people have probably heard of, even though it is a Unesco World Heritage site since 1996, and it is totally worth seeing. The name literally means “beautiful tree” (“albero” — tree; “bello” — beautiful).
Just like the name might suggest, this little town is quite charming. It has all these peculiar houses that made me think I was rather visiting a fictional place and not a real one.
And, I definitely had the feeling while there that all the dwellings might have belonged to relatives of the Hobbits, rather than real people.
The houses are whitewashed and have conical-shaped roofs that seem to be made of gingerbread. Hey, don’t worry, I’m not mixing my stories here (also, the roofs are actually made of stone, and there’s no gingerbread in sight), but the whole place really gives you the feeling that you’ve just stepped into the setting of a fairy-tale or maybe an entire mix of them.
I was there some years ago, and Alberobello had little shops with traditional things for sale. While…
