Ostuni occupies a defensible hill above the Adriatic plain, an advantageous location used by communities long before the present whitewashed town developed. Archaeological evidence from the surrounding area includes the burial of a pregnant woman who lived roughly 25,000 years ago, popularly called the Woman of Ostuni, as well as Neolithic settlements. During the first millennium BCE, Messapian communities fortified hill towns across the Salento region and participated in trade with Greek settlements across the Adriatic.

Rome absorbed the region in the third century BCE. Farms, roads, olive cultivation, and coastal exchange connected the territory to the Roman economy, though the exact relationship between the ancient settlement and the later town remains debated. After the western empire fragmented, Ostuni passed through periods of Gothic, Lombard, and Byzantine influence. Its elevated position offered protection amid conflict, and by the medieval period it had become a walled town and episcopal center.

Norman conquest in the eleventh century integrated Ostuni into a new southern Italian kingdom. Successive Swabian, Angevin, and Aragonese rulers granted privileges, collected taxes, strengthened defenses, and competed for control of Apulia. Frederick II treated the town as part of a strategic royal network. Later walls, towers, and gates protected crowded neighborhoods whose winding streets followed the contours of the hill. The port at Villanova linked agricultural production to maritime commerce.

Ostuni prospered during parts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Noble families and religious institutions built palaces, convents, and churches, while the late Gothic cathedral, reconstructed after earthquake damage, became the summit’s principal landmark. Spanish rule brought heavier fiscal demands and periods of economic difficulty. Epidemics, harvest failures, and political tensions affected ordinary residents, yet olive oil, wine, craft production, and regional trade sustained the town.

The repeated coating of buildings with lime produced Ostuni’s famous white appearance. Lime was inexpensive, reflected heat and light into narrow lanes, and could help sanitize surfaces; later accounts particularly associated whitewashing with responses to disease. The practice created a unified townscape without meaning that every wall belongs to one period. Behind the façades are structures altered through subdivision, repair, and changing domestic needs.

Nineteenth-century political movements linked residents to Italian unification, while roads, rail, migration, and twentieth-century development shifted life beyond the walls. Modern heritage and tourism policies preserved the old center, but depopulation, vacation housing, commercial conversion, and maintenance of limewashed masonry remain challenges. Ostuni’s history extends far beyond its nickname. The White City is a layered Mediterranean settlement shaped by Indigenous Italic culture, conquest, ecclesiastical authority, agriculture, epidemic practice, and the modern transformation of a working hill town into an international heritage destination.

The old town also bears traces of Jewish presence, religious confraternities, local government, and the movement of rural families into and out of the center. White lime visually unifies buildings that once expressed different wealth, occupations, and uses. Conservation policies must therefore protect interiors, street patterns, gates, and views as well as the famous surface color. When tourism reduces Ostuni to a photographic backdrop, it risks displacing the resident practices that kept the town maintained. Its survival depends on remaining a lived place rather than a uniformly restored image.