Property Description

Huge Luxury Apartment in Palermo, with Views of City Landmarks and Mountains, Available at a Bargain Price

With a position on the fourth floor of an historic palazzo on the edge of the fashionable La Kalsa balconies overlooking the city’s iconic Centrale station, it would be hard to find a better location for a luxury apartment in Palermo than the superbly situated Appartamento Michela.

The vast apartment boasts a remarkable total of 256m2 of living space, and would be a fabulous proposition for a family looking to move to the up-and-coming city, a couple with a taste for entertaining or even a lone remote worker who has the means to really take advantage of Palermo’s buyer-friendly real estate market. A property of this scale and position in most European cities would sell for seven figures, without a doubt.

Appartamento Michela has in fact played a fascinating role in the life of this district. Until 2023 it was the home – and surgery – of one Doctor Mario Palazzo Adriano, known as one of the hardest-working general practitioners you could ever hope to be cared for by. Dr. Palazzo Adriano continued to see patients long after the traditional retirement age, and was welcoming them into the front offices of his home almost up until he sadly passed away last year.

The grand apartment building in which the flat is found, Palazzo Caputo Pirrotta, has itself been a longtime landmark. For over half a century it was home to the hugely popular Niceta department store, which only stopped trading in the second decade of this century. In fact, the large space on the ground floor which used to welcome shoppers is shortly to become Palermo’s largest branch of Italy’s number one national banking chain Unicredit.

What is on offer, then, is not only a spacious and elegant four-bedroom home, but also a place at the heart – in every sense – of a storied, elegant neighbourhood that perfectly embodies all the drama and fascination of urban life in Sicily.

It is in need of a lot of renovation work, but needless to say the overall condition of this impressive stone-built building is not in any kind of question. We’ll go into more detail on what will need to be done in a bit, but first let’s look at the luxury apartment in Palermo as it currently stands. 

The Property

The floor plan of this huge home is on an L-shape, with the short side opening onto the arterial Via Roma, and the longer one onto the quieter side street of Via Milano. Along this length are distributed six large rooms, each one big enough to be a spacious double bedroom or welcoming reception room. These all have connecting doors into the adjacent rooms, as well as opening onto the central corridor. So there is enormous freedom to configure the property how you like.

On the inside of the L is a small kitchen, a bathroom with a tub, a separate WC and a variety of sizes of storage space, the largest of which would be big enough to be considered a home office in many more modestly sized homes.

Each of the larger rooms has its own distinct character. The floors are all in patterned Sicilian tiles, with a different motif in each space. The nicest, most intricate patterns are found in the fourth room, which is currently used as a dining room. The fifth enjoys a balcony onto the cool and relatively quiet Via Milano, in decorative masonry and fashioned with wrought iron railings. The first two rooms have identical balconies overlooking Via Roma, with a perfect view of the broad, straight thoroughfare that ends in the grandiose facade of the city’s railway station. 

The largest room in the sequence is the living room, the third you come to and the only one with a dual exposition, on the external corner of the building. This is around 30m2, and while the floor pattern is modest and unshowy, the decorative plastering on the ceiling won’t fail to impress. Similar patterns and frescoes have been created on the ceilings of the final two rooms, currently used as bedrooms.

Each of this sextet of spaces is bright and airy, with a mixture of full-length glazing and traditional windows. The corner room is especially impressive in this regard, with two sides offering unbeatable birds’ eye views of the street below, the rooftops of the city and the mountains that surround Palermo on three sides rising up in the distance, under the huge and frequently cloudless Sicilian sky. The ceilings are at 4.1m, which only accentuates the building’s roominess and class.

On the fourth floor of the building, the apartment is served by a lift.

Surroundings

Despite the fact that Palermo is actually Italy’s fifth-largest city, and the metropolitan area is home to over a million people, the centre of the city is impressively walkable and whether you are heading to take in a performance at the world class Teatro Massimo or marvel at the ornamental fountains of the city’s gleaming brand new Marina, you will be there in under twenty minutes on foot.

If you need to travel further afield or it’s too hot to walk, the buses that regularly pass down Via Roma will soon be joined by a new extension to the city’s growing tram network. What was once a notoriously gridlocked district has been fabulously liberated by a traffic control zone, and as a resident of the old town you will be entitled to use this and park on the street, which is so much easier than it was before the arrival of the scheme.

Of course, Centrale Station is the primary public transport hub for the city, and in some ways for the whole of Sicily. Trains leave for Messina, Catania and the major cities of the Italian mainland, including Naples, Rome and Milan. Coaches will take you to the temples of Agrigento, the wineries of Trapani and Marsala, and the city’s international airport in about 40 minutes.

The La Kalsa neighbourhood, which starts immediately behind Palazzo Caputo Pirotta, is the place to be for food, drink and nightlife. Nowhere is the significant urban regeneration which has lifted the city out of the shades of its tragic twentieth-century past more evident than this buzzy little quarter, with artisanal shops, green public spaces and music around every corner. Whatever kind of day or nightlife you are looking for, you will be sure to find a welcoming social scene in this part of Palermo.

Potential

As we mentioned – and as you’ll understand from the fact that the previous owner lived here well into his nineties – Appartamento Michela is going to need a full overhaul, but the good news is that the potential waiting to be polished up is incredible.

You’ll need to update the electrical and hydraulic infrastructure, both in terms of the wiring and plumbing but also on a cosmetic level – you’ll want to redo the bathrooms and kitchen from scratch. There is neither heating nor cooling in the property at the moment, and while the sturdy old palazzo has excellent natural insulation, it would be wise to add some heat pumps or a hydronic climate control system. On the theme of insulation, the windows are thin and in need of updating, and the shutters are elderly too. 

On the other hand, you will certainly want to keep the floors and ceilings, which exude tradition and charm. The internal doors are sturdy hardwood, and will only need to be sanded down and revarnished. And there are no structural issues with the grand old palazzo whatsoever.

Beyond those renewal tasks, there is of course a significant amount of canvas to work with if you feel like a more comprehensive renovation. While the division of space is certainly generous, you might want to give the layout a more contemporary feels by merging a few of the rooms into the kind of large open-plan spaces that have been created in some of the other units in the same building. 

Another feature of the configuration which seems a little dated to a twenty first century eye is the fact that there is only a single bathroom. The kitchen is also a very isolated space, across the other side of that corridor and not part of family life in the way that it can be in an open-plan layout. You might want to think about creating a kitchen space in a new, larger room on the outside of the building and use the room freed up on the inside to add a family bathroom with a large walk-in shower and perhaps an indulgent hydrotherapy corner tub. The perfect touch to complete your luxury apartment in Palermo.

In our opinion, a budget of between €150,000 and €200,000 will be needed to restore Appartamento Michela to its absolute potential. But once that has been spent you will have a stunning property that will only appreciate in value as this district continues to be regenerated and attract international investment.

Alternatively, with a space of this size, you could actually consider creating two or even three smaller apartments, selling on the ones you don’t plan to use to cover your outlay.

The challenge of a renovation project overseas can be a daunting one, but we are here to make life as easy as you can possibly imagine. Our project management team has been overseeing everything from cosmetic decoration work to entire construction projects on behalf of our international clients for many years, and you can depend on our team to be buy your side, if you would like us there, right up until the moment when your exciting new apartment feels like your beautiful new home.