The year is 1525. You’re a landlord in southern Italy, and word spreads that the king’s tax man is riding into town. He’s here to count houses and levy property taxes. How do you evade the ledger? The answer strikes you suddenly: build homes that can disappear overnight.

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I’m in Puglia, Italy with my girlfriend. Yesterday we visited Alberobello, a small town famous for its cone-shaped limestone huts called trulli.

I learned these distinctive houses are a product of feudal Italy and were evidently built to save the local counts from having to remit tax to the Kingdom of Naples. The story goes that these counts saw a system loophole — that only permanent dwellings are subject to tax — and so ordered their town’s peasants to build flex housing using stone rather than mortar. That way, if the kingdom’s tax man were coming into town to inspect, the landlords could quickly dismantle the roofs on these huts in advance — something that mortar wouldn’t allow for. The inspector would then see that no permanent dwellings in the town technically existed, sparing the counts from a hefty property tax bill.

Trullo house tour

I found this little nugget of history to be fascinating and equally comical. I’ve heard numerous stories of NYC landlords performing all kinds of building gymnastics to avoid the tax man. Things like “upping the basis” where you inflate the purchase price of an investment property to reduce the taxable gain when you eventually sell it. Or intentionally misclassifying a building as smaller or with fewer units than is actually the case, which can lower your tax assessment rate.

People are always trying to cheat and scam the government. I just didn’t realize that Italian counts from 500 years ago were playing the exact same game. It’s hilarious and in a weird but very real sense, heartwarming. We tend to think of people from the deep past — like these landlords from half a millennium ago — not as real people but as boring fonts in stuffy textbooks that nobody in your 3rd period class wanted to read about. But to learn that we share the same trivial problems as these abstract and forgotten people from feudal Italy — the continuity is oddly comforting. Peasants stacking stones in Alberobello and landlords fudging paperwork in New York are basically the same species: resourceful, stubborn, a little shameless.

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Now, that’s the popular lore around Alberobello but unlikely to be the actual truth. Would you really go through all the effort to gut your home on a whim, just to have to put it back together after inspection? And every single time?! The tax evasion story is probably more farce than fact, but the legend persists because it’s romantic and plays into the whole little guy outwitting the evil system story trope.

The more probably reason these huts were built: Alberobello was once a thriving forest (the town’s name alludes to Arbor Belli, meaning “tree of war” in medieval Latin/old Italian — referring to a specific tree in the area whose wood was used to make weapons). The local government likely banned permanent housing to preserve the forest, so the peasants built temporary-ish dry-stone dwellings as a result.

But the myth is far more interesting than the truth and so let Alberobello have its little white lie. Regardless of the factual account, my ultimate takeaway is that with a legend so popular, it means five hundred years can go by, empires rise and fall, and still nobody wants to pay the tax man.