Villas in Ostuni

The town is known as la Città Bianca, the white city, for the lime-washed houses stacked in tiers around its cathedral. The centro storico is a set of narrow lanes, external staircases, and small piazzas that open without warning onto a view of the plain. It is compact enough to walk in an evening and layered enough to keep giving up new corners.

Below the town, the countryside is the real draw. Centuries-old olive trees stand in red earth behind dry stone walls, broken by lamie, trulli, and low farm buildings that have been restored one at a time. This is where most of our Ostuni homes are: private, quiet, and close enough to the town that dinner there is an easy decision rather than an outing.

The plain running down to the coast is the Piana degli Ulivi Monumentali, which holds the world’s highest concentration of millennial olive trees, protected as monuments by regional law. Some of the working masserias among them open their groves and their old underground oil mills for visits and tastings, and buying oil where it is pressed is one of the quiet rituals of a stay here.

The coast is about eight kilometres away. Costa Merlata has the rocky inlets and shallow water the area is known for, and Pilone the long sandy beach. Further down the coast towards Brindisi, the Torre Guaceto marine reserve keeps a stretch of dune and scrub free of development. Ostuni sits at the top of the Valle d’Itria and the edge of the Alto Salento, so Cisternino, Locorotondo, and Martina Franca are half an hour inland, and Lecce is an hour south.

The town keeps an evening rhythm: the passeggiata along the main corso, an aperitivo on the steps of a lane, dinner late and outdoors. At the top of the old town the Gothic cathedral carries a rose window of twenty-four carved rays, and at the end of August the town gives three days to Sant’Oronzo, its patron, with the Cavalcata on the 26th, when riders in red livery escort his silver statue through the streets.