Property Description

Once Part of a Huge Farmhouse in the Madonie Park; now a Four-Bedroom Semi-Detached Home with Beautiful Countryside Views

The southern hills of the Madonie Natural Park are a tranquil haven, totally removed from tourist crowds and undisturbed by the creeping noise of the twenty-first century. While you won’t find the sea views of the park’s northern slopes, what you gain is a peace and quiet, a quintessentially Sicilian way of life and a housing market which offers fabulous value for money. This four-bedroom farmhouse outside Castellana Sicula is a great example.

What was once a huge rustic mansion has now been divided into two semi-detached homes, both owned by members of the same family. There is actually word that the other half of the property is also about to go on the market, giving you the tempting possibility of a joint purchase with friends or family of your own, or maybe even of developing a little tourist accommodation business.

As you would expect from a former farmhouse in the Madonie Park, the surrounding vegetation is lush and green, eucalyptus trees and all manner of smaller shrubs growing freely in the fertile soil. The nearby village is in view from the first-floor terrace of this three-storey home, but you still have a feeling of blissful detachment and calm.

The Property

Casa Aldo has two entrances, with an arched doorway at the front leading into the ground floor and a door from the courtyard at the rear leading into the first floor. This is reached by an external staircase.

Entering from the ground floor, you find yourself in a bright, tall hallway with a window overlooking the woods and a wooden staircase leading past another small window in glass brick. On your left, two living rooms connect through a pair of chunky archways. These have high valuted ceilings, suggesting that originally this was the house’s stable. Nowadays it has been fully renovated, with terracotta floor tiles, wooden windows and shutters and plastered walls.

An internal door brings you into the double garage at the back, with a little messanine floor that offers handy storage. Back inside you’ll find a bathroom fully tiled in navy blue with a box shower, and a bedroom with a garden view.

Up that lovely, open wooden staircase you come to another big living room, this time with a brick fireplace. Twin French windows lead onto a vast deep terrace, which faces east with views over the surrounding treetops to the village nearby. There’s a metal frame on which you can mount an awning that will give invaluable shade in the summer, and baroque-style belly railings in wrought iron.

Behind the living room is a cool dining room with French windows of its own onto that little garden at the rear. The kitchen has wooden cupboards, a free standing oven and a balcony. A bathroom matches the one downstairs but with a tub instead of a shower, and finally a mid-sized double bedroom has a balcony of its own, overlooking the little copse to the north of the home.

A second wooden staircase takes you to an attic under gently sloping eaves which don’t restrict your headroom. A roomy landing opens onto a pair of large bedrooms and a bathroom, this time in a lighter blue. On this level the floors are in parquet.

Casa Aldo is connected to the municipal networks for power and water, and the mountain spring water up in these hills is wonderful quality. It also has its own private well. Central heating is present through radiators which are fed by a diesel-powered boiler.

Surroundings

The house is reached via an unpaved access road, which takes advantage of a right of way across a neighbouring property. It’s an unmistakeably Mediterranean landscape where the only sound you’ll hear is the gentle chorus of cicadas in summer.

Only a couple of hundred metres outside the village of Castellana Sicula, Casa Aldo is reachable by car, bike or on foot. The community is home to about three thousand residents, and has plenty of small shops, bars and restaurants. There are a couple of mini-markets, and bakeries, a post office and banks. At 650 metres above sea level it enjoys four distinct seasons, with hot summers and winters where you may even get a light dusting of snow on occasion. It’s a great base for hiking, cycling and there’s a horse riding school if you’re into trekking.

Although you’re on the southern side of the Madonie, the convenient A19 motorway lets you reach the north coast in much less time than it takes from some villages that are closer as the crow flies. The nearest beach at Campofelice di Roccaella is only a little over half an hour away by car, and picturesque Cefalù is reachable in an hour. If you prefer to explore further inland, the twin cities of Enna and Caltanissetta are 50 minutes away, and the remarkable temples of Agrigento 75 minutes.

For international travel you have a choice of airports, with Palermo’s Falcone-Borsellino and Catania’s Vincenzo Bellini each about 90 minutes’ travel. For such a remote village, in fact, Castellana Sicula is really quite conveniently positioned. Palermo itself is only just over an hour away by car.

Potential

Although we don’t have the other half of the building listed on our site, we can help you find out more if you’re interested in a dual purchase. The fact that it’s in the same family will only make things more convenient. So, too, is a large plot of land to the rear of the upper courtyard, which is owned by the sister of the seller of Casa Aldo. She is also open to offers for this.

Inside the building, you’ll find a home that’s liveable from the word go, but which will need some moderate renovation work to reach its full potential. The bathrooms and kitchen will need to be redone, and you should budget about €5-6,000 for each of these. There is no air conditioning, although at this altitude that may not be a priority.Some water damage has affected the walls and ceiling on the first and second floors, as well as the wooden floor in the latter. You can see, however, that this moisture has come from gutters which have been clogged by pine needles. This means that the good news is that by cutting back the trees in question you will solve the problem.

The former farmhouse in the Madonie Park is being sold empty without furniture. If you would like any assistance decorating or furnishing the place, as well as managing the other logistical considerations of an international move, ask us about our flexible range of after-sale services, designed to make the transition as smooth as possible for any newcomer to Sicily.