Ostuni is the white city: the houses are limewashed and from a distance it looks like a block of chalk on the hill. At the very top is the cathedral, and its front is the only thing that is not white, because it is of pale worked stone. It was begun in 1435 and finished by 1495, in a late Gothic that reached the south decades behind and took on forms of its own.
What to see
The façade is divided into three by pilaster strips and ends in a gable made of two curved arches, an unusual solution you remember at once. There are three pointed doorways and above each a rose window: the central one is far larger and has twenty-four rays of carved stone, and it is one of the finest in Apulia.
The interior has three naves on columns but was remade in the eighteenth century, with a flat painted ceiling and baroque chapels; near the entrance one column of the original building remains. At the end of the left nave is an eighteenth-century wooden altar, and in the apse a carved walnut choir of the seventeenth century.
Visiting
The cathedral is in piazza Beato Giovanni Paolo II, at the highest point of the old town, ten minutes uphill on foot from piazza della Libertà; free entry, closed at midday. Twenty minutes.
Our editors' tip
Come up from below, climbing through the white lanes, and raise your eyes only when you are in the little square: the stone front appears suddenly in the middle of the white, and the effect is calculated. Then look at the rose window against the light from inside, around three in the afternoon, when the sun passes through it.