How Was Ostuni Built

Ostuni is built of the pale limestone it stands on, and then covered so thoroughly that the stone barely shows.

Rings up a hill

The old town is not a grid but a spiral: lanes follow the contours around the hill in rough concentric rings, joined by stairs and ramps cutting up the slope. Many are roofed over where upper rooms bridge the gap between facing houses, so a lane becomes a tunnel and then opens again. The plan is defensive and it works — a stranger loses their bearings within a few turns.

The lime

Everything is coated in calce, limewash, applied over rough stone and rubble walls. It is thick enough to round off every edge and corner, which is why the town has its soft, moulded, almost poured appearance. It is renewed every few years; the coats build up over generations.

The cathedral

Finished in 1495 and deliberately old-fashioned for its date, with a late Gothic front rising to a curved gable and a rose window of twenty-four rays — unusually large for the facade it sits in, and the one piece of showmanship in the whole town.

The Arco Scoppa

An arch thrown across the lane at the top of the town in the eighteenth century, linking the bishop's palace to the seminary opposite so that the clergy could cross without descending.

Star vaults

Inside the better houses the ceilings are volte a stella — vaults whose ribs meet in a radiating star — cut and laid in the same soft stone. They are a Puglian speciality, they span a room without timber in a country with no useful timber, and they are the reason so many of these interiors feel larger than their footprint.

Underground

The rock beneath holds cisterns, storerooms and the hypogeal oil presses, cut rather than built.