DAILY LIFE IN ALBEROBELLO

Don: It’s Tuesday morning, March 7 – well, actually it is just after noon on Tuesday. As you might guess, we didn’t get up all that long ago. And…I have a good excuse. It snowed last night! We sure didn’t expect that. We knew it was going to be colder for a few days, but had no idea it would be THIS cold. We’re not prepared for super cold weather. So, we slept in late in our cozy warm bed and then climbed down the ladder to the cold stone floors of the trullo to get a fire going and eat breakfast. You see, the fire goes out during the night, because, like everything else here, the stove is small and doesn’t hold much wood. Sometimes I build a fire and sometimes Mary Ann does. Today was her day and I put stuff for breakfast on the table while she went to get wood from the underground cave-like wood storage room. Then she put a little newspaper in the stove and some cardboard. We scrounged the cardboard from boxes we found discarded in the village and had to buy an Italian newspaper to get paper to start the fire with. One euro for a paper we couldn’t read! Actually, Mary Ann sat here on the couch for a long time looking at that paper. I think she was trying to make a good impression, but she picked a funny place to do it, because I’m on to her! I know how much Italian she knows! Anyway, she’s done looking at it and we can use it to start fires. On top of the paper and cardboard, we put kindling. That sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s harder than you think because we don’t have a hatchet or axe to split the logs into kindling. The only thing I could find that would work was a heavy hammer and a stone chisel. If you pound the stone chisel into the end of a straight log, there is a good chance it will split. If it doesn’t, then the chisel gets lodged in the log and you have a ____ of a time getting the silly chisel out of the end of the log. I know because I’ve done it a time or two. Then you light the fire and close the door. If the fire gets hot and keeps on burning, you are in luck. If not, you have to open the door to find out why it isn’t burning and smoke billows out into the trullo and you have to open the doors and window (notice I didn’t say windowS because there is only one window on the main level) to let the smoke out. Also, you have to go up the ladder into the bedroom and open a small window up there because smoke rises, you know. All of that opening of doors and windows gets the smoke out, but it also makes the trullo colder which is what you were trying to avoid when you started out lighting a fire in the stove! So, it’s a bit of a challenge to live life in a trullo. You may wonder why I said “trullo” instead of “trulli.” Well, even if you didn’t wonder, here’s the scoop. Trullo is singular and trulli is plural. We live in ONE trullo, thus I use the word trullo.

This trullo has two cone shaped roof sections, a cone nearest the street and one toward the back. We usually use the back section to go in and out. It’s a little doorway , so when you enter, you don’t have to duck at my height, but you have to be a little clever about it if you are carrying anything like a basket of firewood or bags of stuff from the market. Inside the back door is a little sitting room – a living room, I guess. The stove is just inside the door on the right and a couch is on the left. A tiny kitchen is at the far end through a stone archway. The kitchen has an apartment –sized cook-stove, an itty-bitty sink, and an apartment-sized refrigerator. There’s almost no counter space at all but there is a small table with a marble top by the stove that you can use to prepare food etc. The bathroom is through a door beyond the kitchen. Inside the bathroom is a small sink, a toilet, and a bidet. If you need to know what a bidet is, ask Mary Ann. I don’t use it. In one corner, there is what the owners call a shower. It is nothing more than a showerhead mounted on the wall. A curtain can be pulled around your body to keep the water from going all through the bathroom. The water drains into a floor drain. I suppose the shower is supposed to be a modern convenience, but there is a problem. The water heater only has about a 2 gallon capacity, so you run out of warm water in nothing flat! And then it is cold – VERY cold! We have both thought about the prospect of being in the shower when that happens and have decided there are less risky ways of getting clean. One day we clean the top half of our bodies, the next we clean the bottom half. How’s that for a plan?

As you enter the “living room,” there is another stone archway that leads to the dining room. The dining room is under the front cone and a door leads out from it to a recessed entryway and the street. Inside the dining room are a couple of recessed alcoves with small stone archways over them. They hold shelves for various things. There is a nice table with six chairs in the middle. The ceiling is wood, with large logs as support. In one corner is a wooden ladder / stairway that leads to the bedroom. The bedroom is a small room in the peak of the cone of the trullo. There are two single beds up there which we have put together to make a bed the size of a king. Beside those two beds, there is a very small table, a stool, and a blanket chest. There’s not much room to move around. You can only stand up straight in the center of the room which is where the bed is, so you have to be very careful when you bound out of bed in the morning! You just might whack your head on the ceiling which is not very soft at all. It is concrete! Also, there is no railing around the hole where the ladder comes up, so you want to be fully awake if you decide that you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The only window in the bedroom is a tiny thing maybe 10” high and 12-14” wide. There is an inside wood shutter that blocks out all of the light, so it is always night up there. The only way you know it is morning is when the light filters up the stairway from the one window downstairs. Downstairs, the floors are all stone and very beautiful. The cone over the living room is smaller. There is a loft up there which can be reached by an even smaller ladder and a few things are stored up there. I suppose there would be room enough for a single bed if you absolutely needed it, but the risk of jumping out of bed and landing on the stone floor below would be significant.

The trullo is beautiful both inside and out. Outside the patio is SO attractive! The owners have installed beautiful lighting all over. The trullo sits on the side of a hill, so the view from our patio is just delightful. You can see down the hill and over to the other hillside opposite. That hill is covered with trulli. In between is a valley and the main road leading into town. In that valley is where the Thursday market happens and is a more “touristy” part of town. There are lots of little souvenir shops, pizzerias, restarantes, tabacherias (tobacco shops), and wine bars along that way. Most of this we can see from our vantage point in our patio. At night, just below our trullo, there is a mysterious and strange thing: one ride like you would find at a country fair on the midway. It is a circular sort of thing with waist-high walls around the perimeter. When we have seen it, it is always on a slant and looks like it would spin and tilt at the same time. The strange part of it all, is that the signs on the side of it say: DANCE! I’ve never actually seen anyone dancing in that thing and it seems to me that you would risk your life to try it, but there it sits! It is covered with glitter and lights. It is the only spot for children and teens in the whole village and looks entirely out of place in this ancient place. They fire that monster up at about 8 pm and play Italian rock music out of the loudspeakers for a couple of hours. Teens congregate around the thing and you can hear it all over the village. I feel sorry for teens in Alberobello. There is next to nothing to do here for them except this monstrosity of an entertainment site. We hear the music for a couple of hours and then it is silent, thankfully, until the next night.

We have thought that we could easily have opted for a more convenient kind of journey, but we have not regretted our choice. The challenges associated with our choice are certainly significant, but the blessing is that we have been dropped into the very heart of a small town in Italy where seldom anyone is heard speaking English at this time of year. So we are forced to learn Italian ways, connect with local Italians, and struggle to learn to speak their language and understand their words. We cannot be arrogant Americans if we want to survive. We are learning to pay attention to our surroundings, to see and appreciate the wonderful diversity of our planet, and enjoy the richness of new ways, new sounds, sights, smells and new tastes. We have laughed at the things Italians do realizing full well that they, too, have found us amusing and strange. But when we laugh, we do so with great appreciation and gratitude. This place is indeed a blessing. We have made the choice that is right for us and we are thankful for it every day we are here.