Trulli in Puglia, Italy

So, one of the reasons of the fascination with the trullo comes from imagining a kind of life that today we have completely forgotten. It comes with the idea of an intelligent adaptation to what the territory can offer: limited resources, limited energy, limited everything. Sustainability, in short. But the fact that the ancient Apulians were able to adapt in such an intelligent way to their environment doesn't mean that their way of life was sustainable. Trees had not been lacking in the area; it was human activity that had destroyed them. The very name of the main city in the region, "Alberobello," comes from the Latin words "silva arboris belli" which stand for "the forest of the battle". There were forests, there, long ago. Now, they are mostly gone.

Agriculture is far from being a sustainable actvity. It involves deforestation and it slowly destroys the fertile soil. With time, people run out of trees and have to think of how to remove the stones that erosion has uncovered. The result are those stone structures that are so common in areas where the soil has been eroded: stone building and stone walls criss-crossing the land. These structures are typical of arid Mediterranean countries, but you can see them also in South-Western Ireland, where there exists the same problem with erosion. In Apulia, indeed, you have not just stone buildings and stone walls, but also piles of stone, so common that they have a specific name (specchia ). All ways of getting rid of too many stones.

Today, cheap artificial fertilizers (made from fossil fuels) have given new life to the badly overexploited Apulian land. Cheap fossil fuels have made possible to build concrete buildings, to heat them with central heating and to cool them with air conditioning. But the fact that today grain is cultivated in the Trulli valley doesn't mean that erosion is gone. And the fact that you can turn on the air conditioning when it is too hot, doesn't mean that the problem of sustainability is gone.