ALBEROBELLO: A CUMMERSA THAT DOES NOT YIELD TO THE PASSAGE OF TIME

There is a house, in the heart of Alberobello, where an elderly couple lives.

They have lived there all their lives, this is their love nest forever.

It's not your typical trullo, as you might expect from this town, but an imposing multi-story building with a pointed roof, or rather, a cummersa roof. The cummersa - very common in nearby Alberobello - is a sloping roof with stone pitches, obtained by overlapping of "chiancarelle" limestone, of which the land of the Itria Valley is rich. The principle is the same as that of a trullo: peeling off remnants of land to make them cultivable for reuse, creating real homes.

With this ingenuity, mixed with intuition, we had the opportunity to confront just a few months ago, when the elderly couple asked us to restore the roof now in poor condition: at the time we did not yet know what we would discover.

After a first inspection, we understood that those chianche - yes battered, but still all there, well stuck - were on that roof for over 200 years, witnesses of an ancient knowledge that preserved in a tangible way the signs of those people who have been.

To recover the roof a cummersa we used the ancient method of scuci e cuci, using new chiancarelle only and exclusively where it was essential; we completed the work by restoring the ancient flues and the entire facade, cleaned from the old plaster. We thus recovered the ancient stone, choosing to leave it exposed, painting it with lime milk.

It was a project that took three weeks of hard work, but the result was worth every effort.