In the 17th century plague worked its way up Apulia and passed Ostuni by. The credit, the chronicles say, went to lime: people here whitewashed their houses because lime disinfects, and a public health habit ended up defining the way the town looks. Whitewashing is in fact recorded much earlier, in the Middle Ages, for a plainer reason: in the narrow alleys of the old town lime bounces daylight into rooms that would otherwise sit in the dark. The result is visible from miles away, a white historic centre on a hill 218 metres above sea level, riding over a sea of olive trees, and it produced two nicknames, the White Town and the Nativity Town.
What to see
The co-cathedral stands at the top of the hill, begun in 1435 and finished around 1495, its late Gothic front divided by pilaster strips and opened by three pointed portals. The central rose window, with twenty-four spokes, is the largest in Italy and the second largest in Europe: it justifies the climb on its own. The interior was rebuilt in 18th-century forms, and the chapter archive holds more than two hundred parchments starting in 1137. The small square in front is closed by the 18th-century Bishop's Palace, joined to the old seminary by the Scoppa arch, which frames the view like a stage flat.
Of the castle of the counts of Lecce only a turret and the Zurlo garden survive: the rest was pulled down in 1559 to make room for the episcopal palace. Lower down, outside the Aragonese walls and their round towers, two of the four original gates remain, Porta Nova and Porta San Demetrio. Piazza della Libertà is the modern drawing room, with a town hall carved out of the Franciscan convent and the spire of Sant'Oronzo: 20.75 metres of Baroque decoration raised in 1771 by the sculptor Giuseppe Greco to thank the saint for the plague that never came. In the former Monacelle convent the museum shows the cast of the most famous burial in Italian prehistory, the “woman of Ostuni”, about twenty years old and close to giving birth, found in 1991 with her head covered in hundreds of small shells and dead some 28,000 years ago.
Visiting
The old town is a maze of alleys, stairways, arches and tunnels wrapped in rings around the hill: any street going up eventually reaches the cathedral, so the sensible plan is to get lost without a map and wear serious shoes, because the gradient is real and the paving stones are polished smooth. You walk in through the medieval gates, come out on the far side and circle the walls from outside to understand the shape of the place. Two hours cover the loop and the cathedral; add the Monacelle museum and you are at half a day. One warning: in summer Ostuni swells to around 200,000 people and the alleys are walked in single file, while in winter the white stays and the crowd does not.
Our editors' tip
We go up an hour before sunset and walk the outer ring, along the panoramic road under the walls. With the sun low the lime stops being white: it turns orange, then pink, and for ten minutes or so the town changes colour while you watch it. Then back in through the gates for dinner up top, where the tables stand literally on the steps.
