Alberobello is a small picture postcard town situated in the Itria valley. The town is best known for its unique fairy-tale trulli houses. Since 1996 Alberobello was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site because of it ‘being an exceptional example of a form of drystone building construction deriving from prehistoric construction techniques that have survived intact into the modern world’. Alberobello’s trulli are considered to be unique, not only for their special architectural features, but also the fact that the buildings are still occupied and functioning as private houses.

The trulli have been constructed according to an inherited technique dating back to prehistoric times, without any form of foundations, directly onto the rock, with stone worked by hand, placed on top of one another without mortar or any timber, then whitewashed and covered by a tepee like conical dome made of slabs of white chalky rocks and embellished with decorative pinnacles.