The Borgo

“The heart swells to greet you, our guest”.
As you pass through the lava-stone ashlar portal a Latin motto illustrates the ancient inspiration of the main house, as valid today as three centuries ago.
Painstakingly renovated with passionate care, as well as a keen sense of the needs of today's travellers, Borgopetra offers guests a vacation where the emphasis is on comfort, space and the quality of rest and relaxation. And a twin vocation: a delightful place to stay, in the seductive microcosm of the borgo, and an ideal base for exploration, strategically located at the foot of the volcano, close to Catania, the coast and the sea.

Built in the early 1700's in the heart of Mascalucia on the southern slopes of Etna and family seat of the Barons Rapisardi of Sant’Antonio, Borgopetra is a harmonious complex of houses, orchard, vats and warehouses crossed by the Via Teatro. The square-plan manor house enclosing an elegant inner court pleased the American author Washington Irving when he visited Sicily in 1805.




The Roccuzzo family has owned the house since 1980. Together with his wife Cristina Pauly, Toto Roccuzzo began a wholesale refurbishment of the property in 2003. Protected as a historic property by the Office of Monuments and Fine Arts, Borgopetra is an oasis of peace and tranquillity in an ancient urban setting: self-contained, but not remote. The guest apartments are gathered around a square courtyard like houses on a tiny piazza. The lava-stone windows with low relief decorations look onto orchards, gardens and onto Via Teatro. This narrow street takes its name from the old warehouse opposite the entry to Borgopetra which was occasionally used as a puppet theatre. Refurbished and transformed into an attractive leisure space for the use of guests, the old Theatre looks onto a garden of fruit trees, a colonnade and a pergola covered in age-old vines surrounding the swimming pool.