La Sommità Relais Tops Ostuni's Old Town With Rooftop Dining at Cielo

Ostuni earned its nickname, the White City, from the whitewashed buildings that climb its hilltop toward the Adriatic, and La Sommità Relais occupies the highest point of all of them. The hotel is built into a restored 16th-century palazzo, its minimalist interiors and stone-and-linen guest rooms a deliberate contrast to the maze of narrow streets just outside its doors.

Cielo, the hotel's rooftop restaurant, is the reason most guests come up here in the first place. Chef Angelo Convertini runs a kitchen built around ingredient-driven Pugliese cuisine, drawing on the region's olive oil, seafood, and orecchiette traditions, served on a terrace that looks out over Ostuni's rooftops toward the sea. It's a genuinely rare vantage point in a town built almost entirely at ground level.

Beyond Cielo, the property runs three more distinct spaces: Garden Bistrot for more relaxed dining within the palazzo's grounds, Terrazza Belvedere as a rooftop bar for evening cocktails, and La Cantina, a wine cellar restaurant set inside a former olive-oil cistern beneath the building itself. Between the spa, hammam, and cooking classes on-site, and easy day trips to Alberobello's trulli and the ancient city of Matera, La Sommità works as both a destination in itself and a base for exploring inland Puglia.

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