Every Puglian town has its square where the day's business happens, and in Alberobello the market has long been part of the modern town, the one that grew up on the flat ground below the trulli hillside. Travellers tend to rush straight to the Rione Monti and its sea of grey cones, then rush back out again, which is a pity, because the lower town gives the clearest sense of how people really live here. Old men sit on benches, women carry shopping bags from the stalls, and the bakeries open early for the focaccia and the taralli, the ring-shaped crackers that are a Pugliese staple.
The market days bring the farm country into town. Peasant produce from the Itria valley fills the stalls, including olives and olive oil, almonds, figs, tomatoes, courgettes, cheese, and the wild greens that appear in so much local cooking. Cime di rapa, turnip tops, are cooked with orecchiette, the small ear-shaped pasta that grandmothers still shape with a thumb in some back streets. If you see a cheese called burrata, a soft mozzarella shell filled with cream, it comes from this part of Apulia and tastes best the day it is made.
Riding in the surrounding countryside is relaxed, with lots of small roads between white towns. The landscape is high-lying limestone, rolling and broken by dry-stone walls, and the surface is usually decent but can be patchy on minor roads, with sand and gravel at the edges. The most pleasant hours are the early morning and the last two hours of daylight, when the sun turns the stone a warm honey colour. Midsummer middays are very hot, and shade is scarce.
Locorotondo is a short ride away, a perfectly round white town above a valley of vineyards, and from the terrace below its main church you can see for miles. The coast at Monopoli and Polignano a Mare is less than an hour's ride to the east, with fish restaurants and old harbours. Bari, to the north, is the regional capital, with a busy port, the basilica of San Nicola and fresh orecchiette being made on doorsteps in the old town.
With over nine thousand people, Alberobello has petrol, food and cash machines without trouble. Come here for the ordinary rhythm of a southern town rather than a postcard, and buy something to eat from a stall.