The first time I arrived in Ostuni in August, I got out of the car at one in the afternoon and thought something had happened. The streets were empty. Every shutter closed, the whole way up the hill. And the town was so white in that light that I ended up looking at the ground.
Then one woman crossed the piazza. Unhurried, carrying almost nothing, comfortable in a way I very much was not.
I have thought about her every summer since. It took me three more trips to work out that she was not being stoic about the heat. She was following a set of rules the town has lived by for four hundred years, and most of them are visible from the road.
The dress code is painted on the buildings
Ostuni is called la Città Bianca, and the white is not decoration. From the fifteenth century the houses were coated in a lime wash made from the local limestone. It throws the sun back off the walls and keeps the rooms underneath cool, and lime is a natural disinfectant besides. After the plague years of the 1650s the whitewashing went from common to total, then to habit, and today the town keeps it up by local ordinance.
So the whole hillside is a four-century argument about color, made in public, with the results in plain view.
The women there have never needed the lesson explained twice. Walk through Ostuni or Locorotondo this month and you notice the palette before you notice a single garment: chalk, bone, oat, sand, unbleached everything. Not white as a summer mood. White as engineering.
What August actually looks like there
This year the south has been hotter than usual again. Puglia is one of about ten Italian regions that has issued ordinances halting outdoor work between roughly half past twelve and four in the afternoon on the days flagged high risk. The region has effectively written its own afternoon into law.
That matters more to how people dress than any fabric does. Nobody in Puglia is trying to look good at two in the afternoon, because nobody sensible is outside at two in the afternoon. The day has two halves, and the wardrobe is built for the one that comes after.
The landscape sets the rest of the tone. This is a region of sixty million olive trees, responsible in a strong year for more than half of all Italian olive oil, and the color of everything — the stone, the dust, the dry grass, the light on the trulli roofs — is somewhere between ash and straw. Clothes here are not competing with the scenery. They are agreeing with it.
Then the sun drops, and the whole thing turns over. On the evening of the twenty-second, Melpignano fills for the final concert of the Notte della Taranta, the pizzica festival that has run every August for twenty-nine years and pulls in crowds you would expect at a stadium. Nobody arrives in what they wore at four.
The uniform
Here is what I finally understood, sitting in the shade in Ostuni with an espresso I did not want and watching a hundred women go past.
It is one piece, not two. A dress or a long skirt, cut wide, in a color that has never met a dye vat. Layering is a northern habit; down here every seam is a place for heat to sit, so there are fewer of them.
Nothing is tight at the waist. Not loose in a shapeless way — belted at the smallest point and then left alone below, so air moves.
The sandals are already broken in. New shoes in August are for tourists.
And there is one thing that is not clothing at all: an open-weave basket bag, carried the way we carry a tote, that lets the air through and looks better every year it gets battered.
That is the whole uniform. Four decisions, made once, repeated all month. The reason the woman crossing the piazza looked so comfortable was not that she had solved the heat. It was that she had stopped negotiating with it every morning.
Ours this season sit in the same key. A white midi dress that skims instead of clinging, a soft woven wicker tote that goes to the market and then to dinner, and more of the same undyed palette in the dress edit.
Pick one piece you can put on without thinking, in the color of a wall in Ostuni, and give yourself the rest of the month off.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
