Discover the Hidden Gem of Palmenti Pietragalla Italy: A Guide to its History, Culture, and Natural Beauty

Discover the Hidden Gem of Palmenti Italy: A Guide to its History, Culture, and Natural Beauty,

The Palmenti, or millstones, are nothing more than stone houses built to transform grapes into must and then into wine and to pour them into barrels.

In Pietragalla, in Basilicata, a region in the south of Italy, the Palmenti are carved directly into the stone beneath your feet and covered with grass, forming a stunning park landscape, the Parco Urbano dei Palmenti, which today is open to visitors.

If you visit the park you are free to walk over the roofs of these approximately two hundred houses, which are in reality just simple hollows under one’s feet. But getting down, in between them, you can see the doors, and behind them stone rooms, with the right humidity to create one of the products southern Italy is most famous for.

These small buildings seem to emerge from the grass with a somewhat fantastical effect, as if one could expect to see dwarves, or hobbits, or some other enchanted creatures emerging through them, out of the ground itself.