Historic Building and Palazzo Restoration in Sicily

Terra Nostra Costruzioni restores palazzi and historic apartments set inside palazzi across Sicily: whole buildings, piano nobile apartments, top floors with terraces and ground floors opening onto courtyards. We are based in Palermo and work across the whole island, including Catania, Ortigia in Siracusa, Noto and Ragusa Ibla. Our clients are Italian and international owners who want a period building brought back to life properly, with modern systems, without losing what made them fall for it.

A palazzo is not simply a large apartment. Its walls are stone or mixed masonry, its floors may rest on timber beams or on vaults, and its ceilings can hide painted decoration under later coats of whitewash. Many palazzi are listed under the Codice dei beni culturali, and almost all of them stand in historic centres with planning rules of their own. Behind later partitions there may be original doors, maiolica floors or stone thresholds worth keeping, and behind modern finishes there may be damp or decay that has to be dealt with first. That is why we begin with a survey of the structure and the finishes before anyone draws a new layout.

From there we run the project end to end. If you are still looking, we can help you find the right building or apartment and check it before you commit. We then coordinate the architect, the structural engineer and the interior designer, prepare the filings for the Comune, the Soprintendenza and the Genio Civile, and carry out the works with masons and restorers who know lime, stone, maiolica and wrought iron. Materials are sourced to match what is already there, from stone and cotto to handmade tiles and lime finishes. Electrical, plumbing, heating and cooling systems are designed to run through the building without scarring it.

Owners abroad follow every stage in English or Italian, with regular photo and video updates and one point of contact on WhatsApp and email. Where the palazzo is shared with other owners, we prepare what the condominium assembly needs in order to approve works on common parts such as the roof, the facade, the staircase or the courtyard.

With more than 200 projects completed in Sicily, we prefer the large, complex jobs where heritage, engineering and design have to work together. A palazzo restoration is one of them, and we treat it as the long-term project it is: careful at the start, precise on site and finished to the standard of the building itself.

If a palazzo is listed under the Codice dei beni culturali (D.Lgs. 42/2004), any work on it needs authorisation from the Soprintendenza per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali. In Sicily these offices are regional, one per province, so a palazzo in Palermo goes to the Palermo office and one in Noto to the Siracusa office. Even when a building is not listed, the Comune's rules for the historic centre usually govern facades, windows, roofs and colours. The works themselves are filed as CILA, SCIA or Permesso di Costruire, the building titles of DPR 380/2001 as applied in Sicily through L.R. 16/2016.

Structural works, such as consolidating floors, tying walls or repairing vaults, are designed under the NTC 2018 rules and filed with the provincial Ufficio del Genio Civile. Inside UNESCO sites, such as the late baroque towns of the Val di Noto or Syracuse with Ortigia, every visible change is looked at closely. For an apartment inside a palazzo, works on common parts need approval from the condominium assembly. We prepare all of these filings with the designers, keep the documents consistent between offices and plan the works around the approvals, never the other way round.

Large palazzi are rarely restored in one go. A common approach is to secure the envelope first, meaning roof, facades and structure, and then complete the floors in the order you need them. This also lets you live in one part of the building, or let it, while another part is still in progress, provided the site is properly separated and safe. If you plan to divide the palazzo into apartments, or to turn part of it into boutique hospitality, decide early: it changes the permits, the impianti and the fire safety and access requirements.

Historic centres bring their own logistics. Narrow streets in Ortigia, Ibla or central Palermo limit the size of trucks and cranes, deliveries may need permits to occupy public ground, and scaffolding on a facade needs its own authorisation. Summer heat makes plaster and stone work on sun-exposed fronts harder to cure well, while the cooler months suit external work and the hottest weeks suit interiors. We plan the order of works around all of this from the start, so the restoration moves steadily instead of stopping and starting.