Alberobello is a town of grey stone cones, with some fifteen hundred of them, called trulli, packed into two hillside districts, Rione Monti and Aia Piccola. The roofs are built from flat limestone slabs laid dry, without mortar, in overlapping rings until the cone closes at the top, and many of them carry a whitewashed symbol painted on the roof, some Christian, some older and more mysterious. UNESCO listed the town in 1996.
The story told to visitors is that the trulli could be dismantled quickly to hide from the tax inspectors of the Kingdom of Naples, who taxed settled houses. It is a good tale, but historians doubt it. What is certain is that the district's peasants were using a very old technique of dry stone building that still crops up across the Itria valley, in field shelters and sheepfolds, and that Alberobello grew into a dense warren of them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
You need to see it early or late. By eleven in the morning, tour coaches are arriving and the alleys are lined with souvenir stalls selling everything from lace to olive oil, and a cheap version of the town fills the main street. At dawn, or in the evening when the cones turn grey-gold, the place is quiet and genuinely strange, like a settlement for hobbits who had studied geometry.
The riding in the Itria valley is among the gentlest in Italy. The roads wander between whitewashed hill towns, Locorotondo, Martina Franca and Cisternino, past old olive trees, almond orchards and vineyards on red earth. The surface is generally good, the corners easy, and the traffic in the evening light is kind. Spring brings flowers and a fresh green on the dry-stone walls, and summer is hot, so start early. Locorotondo, a few kilometres away, makes a white wine of the same name that is a perfect companion to the local food.
Fuel is easy: Alberobello itself has pumps on its ring road, and Locorotondo and Martina Franca have more. For food, look for orecchiette with turnip tops, burrata from the nearby farms, and a plate of grilled lamb in the town's trattorias. Park outside the old districts and walk the lanes.