Ostuni Guide 2025: The White City of Puglia Complete Travel Guide

Why the Pugliese whitewash tradition began as a plague-prevention measure — and how a 17th-century epidemic created Ostuni's defining visual identity

The specific origin of the Ostuni whitewash tradition (the lime-wash applied to every building surface in the historic center — the visual characteristic that makes Ostuni immediately recognizable) is documented to the aftermath of the 1656-1657 bubonic plague epidemic that killed approximately one-third of the population of the kingdom of Naples. The epidemic's specific effect on building maintenance: the survivors whitewashed the interior and exterior walls of their buildings with lime (calcium hydroxide — the specifically effective antimicrobial agent that was the primary available disinfection tool in the pre-germ-theory period; lime washing kills the bacillus responsible for plague and a range of other bacterial infections by creating a strongly alkaline surface that most pathogens cannot survive). The annual renewal tradition: the lime-wash application was subsequently maintained as an annual pre-summer ritual (applied in late spring, before the heat and the potential disease season) — producing the specific accumulated depth of whitewash on the Ostuni buildings that gives the White City its particular optical quality (the thick, rounded lime application softens the architectural edges, producing the organic, cave-like quality of the oldest Ostuni lanes that no modern paint application replicates).