Ostuni

The White City can be seen from kilometres away: Ostuni climbs in a spiral up its hill, a dazzling mass of houses in quicklime crowned by the cathedral, whose rose window of twenty-four rays is the largest in Italy and the second largest in Europe. And the lime is no affectation: in the sixteen hundreds, when the plague devastated the whole area, Ostuni was spared precisely because the custom of whitewashing the houses with lime, a natural disinfectant, was already established. That habit stopped the contagion, it stayed, and today it is the reason the town is called white. The credit, though, is given locally to Saint Oronzo: in 1771 they raised him a column in the square, more than twenty metres high.

There are three theories about the name, and all three are fine. The first derives it from Sturnoi, a companion of Diomedes who is said to have founded the city after Troy — the Romans indeed called it Sturninum. The second from the Greek ástu néon, new citadel. The third, which many favour on looking around, from the Arabic zeitoun, which means olives: in dialect Ostuni is sctùn. In 1639 Philip IV, in debt from the Thirty Years' War, sold the city to a family of merchants who treated it as a private fief, and the population collapsed. Outside the town, in the park of Santa Maria di Agnano, a grotto-sanctuary has yielded the bones of the pregnant woman of Ostuni: a young woman who died in childbirth twenty-five thousand years ago, now in the museum. The cavalcade of Saint Oronzo, on the twenty-sixth of August, files past with riders in red livery; all round, the plain of thousand-year-old olive trees runs down to the sea.