Nº 020 Coming
trullo
A dry-stone house roofed with a cone of overlapping limestone slabs.
A traditional Apulian hut with thick whitewashed walls and a mortarless corbelled stone cone, historically built so it could be dismantled before royal tax inspections.
The film, in words
This conical stone roof was built without mortar so the whole house could be pulled down overnight.
It's called a trullo: a whitewashed limestone house topped by a dry-stone cone.
Horizontal rings of stone step inward until they lock by gravity alone, wrapped in outer limestone shingles called chianche.
Metre-thick rubble walls absorb the southern Italian heat by day, keeping the small room cool inside.
In Puglia, feudal lords used dry-stone roofs to dodge royal taxes on permanent towns, leaving Alberobello's skyline of cones.
Its cousins: the nuraghe in Sardinia, the clochán beehive hut in Ireland, and the mud-brick domes of Harran.
Trullo. A dry-stone house roofed with a cone of overlapping limestone slabs.
Cousins
- nuraghe Sardinia
- clochán Ireland
- harran dome Harran, Turkey