Pasquetta - Alberobello

On Pasquetta, or Easter Monday, we went to Alberobello. It is famous for its Trulli, which are stone dwellings with a conical roof. They are found mainly in the valley around that area. You can read more about the construction here, but one of the theories is that they were made with only bricks so they could be disassembled quickly when tax collectors were coming to town. I don't know about that, but they are pretty cool.

Easter Monday is a day when all the Italians feel the need to go out and be tourists for a day, so Alberobello was packed with people even though the weather was crummy. We were told by one person that it wasn't that busy because of the weather. Yeah, it was still packed by our standards!

Anyway, we parked the car, and it was raining. We got our rain gear on and headed into the town to walk around. It was a super tourist trap, but it was pretty neat anyway. They had lots of shops, and everyone was giving free samples (of food and drinks)...can't complain about that!

Aaron in Alberobello. We were in our rain gear.
This is me on top of one of the buildings. You can see that there is a city of trulli, and the new city backs up to it.
Self portrait on top of the building.
Me in front of the trulli church.
A cool building in Alberobello.
Aaron in front of some trulli. The symbols on them mean different things, but I have no idea what they are :)
We were at least smart and made reservations for lunch as soon as we saw a decent restaurant. Every place had a fixed menu because of the holiday, but we picked a good restaurant. It was built into a trullo. We had Burrata (special type of cheese from this area) and prosciutto for antipasti. For the primi, Aaron had pennette with tomato and mushroom sauce, and I had orecchini with tomato and rucola. We both had spiedini (essentially meat skewers from the grill). It was a yummy lunch.

After lunch we walked around a little before we found an Enoteca (wine store and tasting area) to visit. There was a nice man in there who told us about the wine from the area and gave us some pointers about the area. After our stop there, we planned to walk through the rest of town and just enjoy the scenery. That didn't work out so well for us as it started POURING!

Aaron in the rain. It was sad because this part of town was more residential, and we didn't get to explore it well.
Aaron messing around with the drain spout :)
We gave up and busted out of there. We sat in traffic for a while to exit this dinky town, and then took some back roads back to the agriturismo.

'A' is for Aaron!
I thought this was a cool trullo.
A cherry tree (trulli in the background).We got back relatively early and the skies were clearing, so we took a bike ride in the area. We did a short ride (30 km or about 19 miles), but it was great to get some exercise in. We might have gone a little bit longer, but there was a strong wind (as usual) and it was getting pretty cold with the sun going down.

Aaron on the bike ride.

I was there, too. This is the agriturismo behind me on the return trip.A good picture of the agriturismo.
Sights around the agriturismo.

After the bike ride, we packed up our stuff, showered, and played the gameboys for a while before going to bed. We were really tired even though we didn't do that much. It was good though because we needed to be up early for the ride home. We ended up getting up and were on the road at 6:15 on Tuesday morning on the drive back. It was a beautiful drive back as the skies were clean because of the cold air, so the mountains looked huge. I always love these days. There was some traffic on the return trip which was a pain, but we made it back around 11 a.m. for a full day of work. We are good!

Ciao ciao!

Monday, March 24, 2008, Alberobello