In Italy’s heel of the boot, elves must’ve been afoot throughout the fairytale village of Alberobello, the world’s only enclave of 1,500 hobbit-like, stone trulli houses seemingly painted in white powdered sugar and capped with roofs resembling pointy gray party hats. To magically ward off demons, some trulli are marked with symbols, such as an arrow-speared heart.

Built centuries ago, the whimsical abodes brim with trulli-centric life: I sipped the local Primitivo in trulli wine bars, ate nonna’s pasta in trulli trattorias, shopped in trulli that sold trulli-shaped bottles of limoncello and teeny trulli earrings, and slept in a trullo (singular of trulli) as bells chimed from a church holding hallowed bone fragments of Alberobello’s patron saints.