Seven kilometres.
That is the whole distance between the town and the water, and I had read it a dozen times before I came and understood nothing by it. Seven kilometres is nothing. It is a number you skip over.
It is also the reason Ostuni is Ostuni and not a resort.
I left at half past seven with the windows down and the road going off the hill in long, slack curves through the olives, and the trees on that plain are not the neat ones. They are enormous and hollowed out and standing at angles, trunks turned like rope, some of them split open down the middle and still carrying a full head of leaves. Nobody plants a tree that shape. It arrives at it.
The light came through them sideways and the road was striped with it the whole way down.
Then the land flattens, and there is a stretch of low scrub and dune, and the sea.
I went to the rocky part first because somebody at the hotel had told me to and because the name is a promise. Merlata. Crenellated. The coast there is bitten into, a run of small inlets cut back into low pale limestone, each one holding its own square of water, each one big enough for about six people and no more.
I found one with nobody in it at ten past eight.
Here is the thing about getting into water off rock. There is no wading. There is no gradual anything. You sit on a hot ledge and put your legs in and the cold goes up you in one movement, and then you either commit or you sit there being a coward in front of nobody.
The water was 26 degrees and still managed to feel like a decision.
I swam out far enough to turn round and look back at the coast from the sea, which is the correct way round to see this stretch and almost nobody does it. From out there the land is low and pale and scrubby and entirely unremarkable, and the town is invisible, and you would not guess from the water that anything is up there at all.
My father was easiest near water. I have never worked out whether I inherited that or only learned the shape of it by watching, and I have stopped needing to know. I float badly and I swim a long way, which he would have found funny.
By half past ten the cove had four other people in it and by eleven it had nine, and nine is too many for a cove that size, so I went up the coast to the reserve.
That is the other thing this coastline does, and it does it well. Twenty minutes north there is a protected stretch with no clubs on it. No loungers in rows. No bar putting music out across the sand. Dune and low scrub running down to open beach, and an old stone watchtower standing out on the point, square and blunt and much smaller than the photographs make it.
The difference is not scenery. It is noise.
I had not understood how much of an Italian beach in August is sound until I stood on one that had none. Just wind in the scrub, and the water arriving, and very occasionally somebody’s voice a long way off, carried and then dropped.
I stayed until four. I did almost nothing. I have a page of notes from that day and it says: pale, flat, loud with not being loud. Which is the kind of thing that seems worth writing down at the time.
There is no shade out there. That is the price, and it is a real one. By two the sand was not walkable barefoot and I had gone through all the water I brought and was rationing what was left, and the hat I had thought was excessive in the shop that morning turned out to be the single best decision of the day.
I drove back at six with salt still on my arms.
And this is the part I actually came away with.
You climb. The road turns and lifts and the olives go past again in the other direction, and then at a particular bend the town appears above you, all of it at once, high and white and stacked, with the sun low enough by then to be coming across it rather than down on it.
From the beach, you cannot see Ostuni. From Ostuni, you can see the sea but not reach it.
They are seven kilometres apart and they do not look at each other. And it means the town was never built for the coast, never bent itself toward it, never grew the strip of hotels and neon and hire-bike shops that a town on the water grows whether it wants to or not. It has been up there minding its own business for a very long time, doing something else entirely.
The sea is a place you go to. It is not what the town is about.
I came back up sunburnt in a stripe across the tops of my shoulders where I had missed, and I ate very late again, and I could taste salt on my own skin all evening under the lamps.
Tomorrow I want to go inland instead. Into the olives properly, and out to one of the old fortified farms sitting in the middle of all that silver, where I am told you eat what was picked that morning and nothing arrives on the table having travelled.
Tonight, the shoulders, and the sound of the water still going in my ears.
V.
This is a diary from Ostuni. The practical version of the coast, which beach is which and how to get to them, is in my guide to the best beaches near Ostuni, and the town itself is in my complete guide to Ostuni.
