Trullo Sovrano Audio Guide

Trullo Sovrano: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Trullo Sovrano

   Welcome to Piazza Sacramento, in the northern part of Alberobello, in Puglia. You are standing near the Trullo Sovrano, a house that does something no other trullo in town manages: it rises to a second floor. It sits just behind the Church of the Holy Doctors Cosmas and Damian, so if you can see the church, you are very close. The town is full of those famous cone-roofed stone houses. Yet the Italian Ministry of Culture calls this one the largest trullo in the town, and the town itself describes it as the peak of what trullo builders could design. Look at the scale of the building and its several entrances, and you will see why it earned the name Sovrano, which means sovereign. Over the next few minutes we will look at how it was built, how a trullo can have an upper floor at all, and the many lives this building has had, from pharmacy to chapel to museum home. We will also see how it came to be protected, as one of the special places inside the UNESCO World Heritage listing of the Trulli of Alberobello.

2. 02

   A Trullo With an Upstairs

   Most trulli are single-storey affairs: walls below, a stone cone above. Trullo Sovrano breaks the pattern. You enter a vaulted room on the ground floor, and the trullo roof is built on top of that vault. The volume inside the cone becomes the first floor, which was used as a guest room or as a place for weaving. How do you get up there? Not by a ladder. The staircase was carved out of the thickness of the walls, and that detail tells you how massive the masonry is. The same thick walls hold niches and cupboards with shelves. Once walled up, these became hiding places, which proved very useful in the days of banditry. Before the building was divided up in recent times, it counted 12 rooms and several entrances. It is also among the first trulli built with mortar, in the style the Italians call a cotto, rather than the traditional dry-stone method. That is why historians describe it as a building of transition, one that announces a coming change in how trulli were made. The mason who designed it is unknown, but his solutions were unique, and the building is often called the most advanced and admirable interpretation of trullo architecture.

3. 03

   The Perta Family and a Question of Dates

   Who built it? The building is tied to the Perta family, wealthy and linked to the priest Cataldo Perta. When it was built is told in two ways. One account says the family had it built in the middle of the eighteenth century. Another places the facade securely in 1797, or at the very latest the year before. The second story involves the local feudal lord, Count Giangirolamo Acquaviva, who set rules for how trulli were to be built. The turn of events prevented those prescriptions from taking effect, and that is part of why the facade can be dated to the late 1790s. Even so, the building follows the rules of that local tradition while pushing them further than anything else around it. There is another detail worth savoring: the surviving record speaks only generally about the perspective of the great door. It says little about exactly how the two levels came to be or how the older structure inside was altered. So the building still keeps some of its secrets, much like its anonymous master mason.

4. 04

   Many Lives, and a Place in World Heritage

   Over the centuries this building has worn many hats. It has been a court, a chapel, a pharmacy, a monastery-like retreat, a country oratory and a home. The relics of Saints Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of Alberobello, were once housed here, and in the 1820s the Confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament held its oratory within these walls. Its protection began early. The Trullo Sovrano was declared a national monument in 1923, five years before the Rione Monti district received the same recognition in 1928. On the seventh of December 1996, together with the Trulli of Alberobello, it entered the UNESCO World Heritage list. UNESCO singles it out as one of four specific locations in the property, a rare example of a two-storey building. In 2015 a ministerial decree also placed it on the list of sites of particular historical and artistic interest. Today the Trullo Sovrano is privately owned. It was restored in 1993 and is used for temporary exhibitions and cultural meetings. The Ministry of Culture notes that its interior is furnished in period taste, reconstructed from the memories of the oldest residents of Alberobello. In summer it has hosted theater, small orchestras, jazz and evenings of poetry.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   As you linger around Piazza Sacramento, try reading the building as a story in stone. Notice how heavy and broad it looks next to the smaller trulli you may have passed, and imagine the stair, the niches and the upper room hidden inside the thickness of the walls. Look up at how the cone sits on top of the lower volume, the feature that makes this house unique in Alberobello. Then glance toward the church of the town's patron saints just beside it, and think about how a pharmacy, a chapel, a home and a gathering place could all have shared these same rooms. There is plenty more to discover in the districts that surround you, where hundreds of trulli crowd the lanes of the UNESCO-listed town. See whether you can pick out a clue in the stonework that hints at the shift from dry stone to mortar, the quiet revolution this building announced.