Castello Xirumi wedding

The castle went up in the sixteenth century on the edge of the Catania plain, and for three hundred years it belonged to the Grimaldi barons of Serravalle. It is still privately owned, and still the centre of a working citrus estate, one of the largest in eastern Sicily.

Inside the walls is a small village rather than a house. A courtyard, and off it a palmento where wine was made, an olive mill, a granary, a chapel with its stained glass, and rooms that open into one another the length of the building.

Oranges grow to the gate.

The restoration left the working buildings as they were: stone floors, wooden roofs, arched windows, the granary’s original chandeliers. Nothing was smoothed into a function room, which is why the place photographs like a castle rather than like a venue.

One event a day, on sole use, so the castle is yours from noon until the music stops.

The granary, where the harvest was stored: slender columns, a wooden roof, the original chandeliers hanging the length of it. It seats 300 for dinner, which means the wet-weather plan at Xirumi is the same size as the sunny one.

The centre of the castle, open to the sky, with the buildings around it. Aperitivo belongs here, and it is where the wedding gathers before anything is announced.

A grove of old trees beyond the walls, one of them vast, with roots that reach across the ground. The ceremony goes under it, and the estate sets up the chairs and the table.

A small palatine chapel inside the walls: stone, stained glass, candles. For a ceremony that wants a roof and an altar rather than a garden.

The wine press and the mill: vaulted, cool, with the old stone basins still in them. They take the dinner for a smaller wedding, or the party after the dinner for a larger one.

The pool lies below the gardens with the plain and the hills beyond it, and the grove is hired for a lunch or a long aperitivo among the trees. Both are priced on top of the sole use rather than included.

Eleven rooms sleeping nineteen, inside the castle walls. The Barons’ Apartment holds six rooms for ten people; the guesthouse holds four rooms and a suite for nine; and the couple’s suite comes with the wedding.

The rooms are the castle’s own, which is to say high, green-walled, furnished with what the family has: iron beds, prints on the walls, shutters that open onto ivy and the plain.

The castle cannot sleep a wedding, though: nineteen beds against 300 guests is the arithmetic of this venue. Catania is 40 minutes away and holds the hotel stock, the towns of the plain hold the rest, and every Xirumi wedding is therefore a coach plan as much as a design.

The castle is at Serravalle, in the comune of Lentini, in the province of Siracusa, on the western edge of the Catania plain.

Catania is 40 minutes and 31 kilometres away. It carries Delta’s non-stop flight from New York from mid-April into October, the only one into southern Italy, and good European connections the rest of the year. Comiso is an hour and a quarter and takes low-cost routes.

Catania itself is 40 minutes, Siracusa an hour and ten, Taormina an hour and twenty, Ragusa an hour and twenty-five, Noto an hour and a half.

We route these rather than repeating them, because the castle’s own summary is generous: it describes Taormina, Siracusa and Noto as about an hour away, and none of the three is.

The castle is let for sole use, one event a day, from noon until the music stops: just under €8,000 with VAT, which is the ground rather than the wedding.

• Sole use of the castle, its buildings and the gardens along the main front
• The courtyard and the interiors, air-conditioned
• Reception staff, security on the gate, the car park, the cloakroom
• Furniture, the generator and the sound system, inside and out
• The couple’s suite on the night of the wedding

The ceremony spaces in the wood and the chapel, the pool, the citrus grove, the ten other bedrooms, and the hours after two in the morning are each priced separately. So is the whole wedding: the caterer, the kitchen they build, the design, the flowers, the lighting, the music, the photography and the coaches.

A Magic Day wedding at Castello Xirumi starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000.

Buy the hours before you need them. The event ends at two, and the castle sells the time after that by the hour to half past five. We agree the finish when the date is held, because deciding it at one in the morning costs the same money and a worse night.

There is no curfew fight here. The estate has no neighbour close enough to hear it, so the music stays outdoors and the party never has to move inside. That is rare in Sicily and it should shape the whole shape of the evening.

Plan wet weather for the same number. The Granaio takes 300, so unlike almost every other venue on the island you do not shrink the wedding to get it indoors. We still walk the room with the couple, because a hall of 300 is a different feeling from a garden of 300.

Use the buildings, not one room. The palmento, the mill, the courtyard and the granary are within a minute of each other, and we move the wedding through them: aperitivo in the courtyard, dinner in the granary, the last hours in the vaults where the wine was made.

Count the coaches first. Nineteen beds and 300 guests means almost everybody arrives and leaves by road in the dark. We never plan the finish time before the transport, because at this castle the transport decides it.

Castello Xirumi sells one thing: the castle, empty, for a day. Staff on the gate, furniture, power, and the courtyard, the granary, the mill and the chapel to put a wedding in. Every part of the day itself, from the kitchen to the last speaker, arrives that morning and leaves that night.

What a planner does here is build a temporary hotel and a temporary restaurant inside a sixteenth-century castle, then take them out again. Nineteen beds against 300 guests decides the transport; a granary seating 300 makes the wet-weather plan easy and the timeline hard, because moving a wedding indoors at Xirumi means moving 300 people rather than sixty; and the hours after two are bought, not begged.

Magic Day plans weddings at Castello Xirumi from the first conversation to the final farewell.