Day 23. Cone shaped tax havens.

After three weeks in Europe the inevitable happened…it rained! We have been incredibly blessed by great weather to date, so we try not to let a little drizzle slow us down…until it becomes a sodden gale.

We get up early and walk around Locorotondo as the town is beginning to stir and the Sunday church bells call people to worship. With its white limestone walls and smooth ivory-coloured stone streets we understand why Lonely Planet described Locorotondo as one of the prettiest towns in Italy. We are staying in a ‘diffused hotel’, a hotel with lots of rooms spread throughout the old city. Our room has stone walls, floor and ceiling and this along with the kitchen is typical of the stone buildings that make up the town. It comes with a stone balcony as a bonus.

The other unusual feature of this area are the gnome like Trulli homes, dry stone walled houses with cone-shaped stone roofs. In the day (700 years or so ago) the way to beat the land tax (actually a house tax) was to dismantle your dry stone hut when the taxman came to town, only to reassemble it again after he had left town. Some of the trulli are now used for shops, restaurants and accommodation but many are still family homes. These houses dot the rural landscape and are often surrounded by fields divided by beautiful dry stone walls.

The other big achievement of today is that Richard (using only Italian) successfully booked a table at a ristorante.  On a very wet, chilly night we are glad we had booked because we are the only people in the restaurant and we guess that they may not have bothered opening up had we not made the reservation. We feel a bit guilty, but the family is very friendly and sits down to eat their own meal as we are finishing ours. Needless to say the service is very quick (a five course degustation menu in less than ninety minutes) and the food is the best we have eaten in Italy.