"Ostuni is the panoramic city par excellence, every house is a belvedere, every trattoria is Bellavista’s, at every window there is a poet who looks into the plain below the olive trees that can be coloured by all winds […] In Ostuni the houses are white, made of milk and lime, they are white to the point of hurting the eyes, the walls, the windows, the doors, the stairs, everything is improbably white. […] In Ostuni one goes to understand what it means to be sheltered from the sun […] not to desire more novels, not to think about distant journeys, here there is the charm of all the cities of the South Seas, here there is the equator at hand. Ostuni rises on three hills at a height of 218 meters above sea level. It is located 8 km from the Adriatic coast. The Murgia, on whose south-eastern foothills lies the city, is a karst area consisting mainly of Cretaceous limestone. It is therefore a rather arid area without watercourses: in their place the so called "lame", seasonal torrential beds with shallow furrows and steep walls. Another geological characteristic of the territory are the ravines and karst ravines.
The most important economic activities are tourism and agriculture (mainly olive trees and vines). Important and numerous the presences of structures called "masserie", that is ancient fortified farms present both in the Ostuni forest and in the marina, where the agricultural activity of the big landowners took place.
In the Upper Palaeolithic period, traces of human remains became more substantial: the excavations carried out allowed the discovery of bone and ceramic finds. However, the most striking evidence remains the discovery of the skeleton of the Ostuni" a woman of about 20 years of age close to giving birth and her fetus, discovered by Prof. Donato Coppola of the Aldo Moro University of Bari in 1991. The body, laid in a large hole, is in a contracted position, with the head covered by a sort of cap.
