Borgo del Carato wedding

Two farm villages stand side by side in the carob country above Siracusa, both built in the nineteenth century and both left to the weather for most of the twentieth. Case Sollima was taken back stone by stone and reopened in 2015 by the Crispino family, who run it still.

Carato is the carob, the tree that shaded Sicilian farmyards and fed the animals through the summer, and the groves around the borgo are still carob and olive.

The second village, Case Catalano, was bought in January 2025 and is being restored the same way.

What the restoration left is a working Sicilian farm rather than a hotel built to look like one: low stone buildings around courtyards, a chapel, arched cellars turned into halls, and a long pool laid into the grass with the hills behind it.

The estate takes a wedding outdoors and keeps a real answer indoors, which in Sicily in October matters more than anything in the photographs.

Three hundred guests sit in the gardens, under the olives or along the pool, and this is where a Sicilian wedding belongs from May to September. The pool is the length of the lawn and the party spreads around it after dinner.

Inside, three vaulted halls of stone take 140 between them, and they are where the ceremony goes when the sky is wrong. They are also where the winter weddings happen, because the borgo runs all year.

A small chapel on the estate, for the couple who want the religious ceremony where the party is rather than an hour away in a town. The civil ceremony is held here too.

Between the buildings, two courtyards under pergolas of vine and wisteria, deep enough for the welcome dinner or the aperitivo, with terracotta jars the size of a person along the walls.

A sauna, a steam room and a treatment room in the old stone, which sound like resort filler and are not: they are what the wedding party uses on the morning of the day before, and they keep the guests on the estate rather than in the car.

Twenty-six rooms, sleeping 60, with breakfast for everybody in the package. They are farm rooms rather than suites: white walls, beamed ceilings, tiled floors, and windows onto the courtyards or the groves.

Case Catalano, the second borgo, adds seven rooms from 2026 and is booked separately from the wedding.

Above 60 guests the rest of the list sleeps in Siracusa, half an hour down the SS124, which holds hotels at every level, or in Palazzolo Acreide fifteen minutes the other way. Both need coaches at the end of the night, and that is the line most couples underestimate here.

The borgo sits on the SS124 at kilometre 97, in the comune of Palazzolo Acreide, in the Iblean hills of the province of Siracusa.

Catania is an hour away, 65 kilometres, and is the airport for this wedding. It carries Delta’s non-stop flight from New York from mid-April into October, which is the single strongest argument for the Val di Noto over anywhere else in Italy when the guest list is American.

Comiso takes low-cost European routes and is an hour and a quarter. Palermo is three hours on the far side of the island and is the wrong answer.

Siracusa and Ortigia are 32 minutes away, Noto 51 minutes, Ragusa an hour and ten. Palazzolo Acreide itself, fifteen minutes up the road, is one of the eight late-Baroque towns of the Val di Noto that UNESCO listed together in 2002, and it is where we send guests on the free morning.

The borgo is taken whole for two nights or three, with its rooms and breakfast, and the party is written into the package until half past two in the morning: just under €20,000 with VAT for three nights.

• Sole use of the whole estate, with no other guests on it
• The 26 rooms for the nights taken, with breakfast every morning
• The gardens, the pool, the courtyards, the halls and the chapel
• The party until half past two, without an hourly charge after midnight

The wedding itself. The kitchen inside the borgo cooks it from €110 a head, with the food, the drink and the setting up, or a caterer comes in and brings its own. The design, the flowers, the lighting, the music, the photography, the coaches and the second and third days of a three-day wedding are all budgeted on top.

A Magic Day wedding at Borgo del Carato starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000.

Use the in-house kitchen for the small nights. The welcome dinner and the farewell brunch are where an outside caterer costs the most and shows the least. We recommend keeping those inside the borgo and spending the money on the wedding day.

The beds decide the guest list. Sixty sleep here and everybody else is half an hour away, so the shape of the night depends on how many coaches leave and when. We plan the last coach for two and keep the residents’ party going after it.

Book the halls, then hope for the garden. The three halls hold 140, so a wedding above that size needs a structure held from the day the date is. In April and October we have used the halls more often than not.

Palazzolo is the day out. Guests who have flown to Sicily want Sicily, not a resort. A morning in the Baroque of Palazzolo Acreide and an afternoon in Ortigia does more for a three-day wedding than any activity booked on the estate.

There is no curfew to argue with. The party runs to half past two under the sole-use package, which is later than most of Sicily allows and later than any hotel on this coast will agree to. What the borgo cannot do is run the music past that hour without asking, so we set the last hour with the estate when the date is held rather than on the night.

Watch the road at night. The SS124 is fast and dark, and narrow in places, so a coach that leaves at two takes longer than the map says. We use drivers who know it rather than whoever is cheapest in Siracusa.

Borgo del Carato gives a wedding a whole Sicilian farm for three days: two courtyards, three halls, a chapel, a pool, 26 rooms and a kitchen that can cook the whole thing. For a wedding of 60 that is nearly everything, and a couple who want a small, easy, good Sicilian weekend can almost buy it off the shelf here.

Above 100 it becomes a production. The estate holds 300 in the gardens and 140 indoors, so the wet-weather plan is a real decision rather than a footnote; the beds run out at 60, so most of the guest list is driving in from Siracusa; and the second and third days have to be built rather than booked. None of that is difficult, and all of it is work.

Magic Day plans weddings at Borgo del Carato from the first conversation to the final farewell.