Ostuni
— — a white town above an old sea of olives.
Not only on a wall.
“The hill town the locals call La Città Bianca, the white city, above the Itria Valley, eight kilometres from the Adriatic. The lime that gives the old centre its colour was first brushed on for plague control in the seventeenth century; it stayed because of how the southern sun bounces back off it. The olive groves below run for miles, some trees more than a thousand years old. Mornings here are slow. People sit out on stone steps with espresso, and the cathedral rose window above the town catches the early light.
Ostuni, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Ostuni rises on three low hills above the Itria Valley in the province of Brindisi, in Puglia, southern Italy. The historic core sits at about 218 metres, roughly eight kilometres inland from the Adriatic coast, ringed by stretches of fifteenth-century Aragonese wall. The town's population is around 31,000, and in summer it grows with visitors heading to the beaches between Torre Pozzelle and Rosa Marina. The medieval old town climbs to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, a late-fifteenth-century church with a Gothic-Romanesque facade and one of the largest rose windows in southern Italy. The nearest airport is Brindisi-Casale, about 35 km south.
The white lime coating that earned Ostuni the name La Città Bianca was reinforced as a sanitary measure during the great plague that swept southern Italy in 1656, killing tens of thousands across Apulia. Lime is mildly antibacterial, and its white surface reflects the August sun back off the walls, keeping the stone interiors below cool. The practice continued because both reasons held. The historic centre is still kept white by residents and the comune, with refresh coats applied through the year. The dense network of vicoli (narrow alleys) and stone staircases climbs the hill to the Aragonese walls and the cathedral square at the summit.
The plain below Ostuni is the Piana degli Ulivi Monumentali, a regionally protected landscape of ancient olive groves running between Carovigno and Fasano, where some trees are estimated at over two thousand years old. The air carries olive wood, wild fennel, and bay. Puglia produces around 40 per cent of Italy's olive oil, and the surrounding mills press the early-October harvest from these trees, many of them dating to Roman cultivation. From the cathedral terrace at the top of the old town, the grove extends uninterrupted to the Adriatic. By late afternoon the light goes amber and the white walls take it back.