Ostuni whitewashes its entire historic center every year, a practice with roots in plague-era public health ordinances that used lime wash as a cheap disinfectant, and the habit stuck long after the medical reasoning behind it faded.
The result is a hill town that reads from a distance as a single sculptural mass of white cubic houses rising from the Salento olive plain toward the Adriatic, a silhouette so striking it earned the nickname La Città Bianca. Its lanes spiral upward through a genuinely confusing medieval street plan, designed at least in part to disorient raiders, toward the Concattedrale, a Gothic cathedral finished in the late 15th century whose facade centers on an elaborate rose window unusual for the region. Beneath the town, archaeological finds including a 25,000-year-old Paleolithic burial, nicknamed Delia, place human presence here far earlier than any of the visible medieval architecture suggests.
Sources and citations (3)
- Comune di OstuniCentro Storico di OstuniDescriptionRead source
- Comune di OstuniObbligo di imbiancatura delle facciateOrdinance summaryRead source
- Regione PugliaPPTR landscape materials — Ostuni historic centre and terraced gardensOstuni terraced-garden descriptionRead source
