Ostuni

You see Ostuni from the road before you reach it — the white city on the hill, rising out of the flat Pugliese countryside like something that was placed there rather than built. The olive groves surrounding it are ancient enough to have a wildness to their shapes, trunks twisted into postures of effort, some of them documented to be over a thousand years old. Driving in from the coast in late afternoon, the sun going sideways and the city catching it on every whitewashed surface, I had to slow down. The light was doing something I did not have vocabulary for.

The old town is a maze of lanes climbing toward the cathedral, each one narrower than the one before, the walls so bright they function as a kind of mirror. In the early afternoon even sunglasses feel insufficient. The residents seem immune, going about their business in the white glare, a woman in slippers sweeping steps that are already immaculate, a man leaning from an upper window to argue with someone invisible on the lane below. The architecture is stratified — Arab, Norman, Baroque — but the whitewash unifies everything into a single visual statement. Every generation repainted what the previous one built.

The cathedral at the top commands the hill and the view from its terrace is the one you should save your best light for. To the east the Adriatic appears on clear days as a flat blue stripe thirty kilometres distant. Below the old town, the terraced slopes fall away into olive groves that extend in every direction, interrupted occasionally by a masseria — one of the old fortified farmhouses that dot the Pugliese countryside like full stops in a text. These masserie have been converting to agritourism for decades; I stayed in one outside the city, down a white gravel track through the olives, and the owner served dinner at a long communal table in a stone courtyard. We ate what the farm produced: mozzarella pulled that morning, roasted peppers, lamb from the fields behind the house, a red wine from grapes grown in the rows I had walked through before sunset.

The evening in Ostuni transforms the daytime blaze into something more forgiving. The whitewash cools through pink and gold and eventually a luminous grey-blue, and the lanes fill with people doing the passeggiata, the southern Italian evening ritual of walking together for the purpose of walking together. I followed the loop several times, buying a granita from a bar on the outer ring and watching the light die over the olive groves. A German couple asked me to take their photograph. I told them to wait five minutes for the better light. They waited.

Down on the coast, the Ostuni marina area at Rosa Marina and Villanova is quieter than the more famous Pugliese beach towns — smaller, more local in summer, less packaged. The water is that particular Adriatic clear, the kind where you can see the sand ripple pattern four metres down. I swam alone one morning at seven, the beach empty except for a fisherman setting out from the small pier. The season was ending and the beach chairs were stacked and covered, and I had the whole Adriatic to myself for an hour, which felt like a form of extravagance.

When to go: May and June, or September through October. August in Ostuni is busy and loud and expensive — the old town clogs with visitors and the masserie charge their peak prices. The shoulder months give you the place at something closer to its own pace, which is unhurried and tends toward the long lunch and the late evening, as it should be.