Piano Battaglia: Sicily Has a Ski Resort, and It Is Not on Etna

An hour and a half from Palermo, and about the same from the beaches at Cefalù, there is a place in Sicily with ski lifts. Not on Etna — in the Madonie, on a plateau at 1,572 metres, surrounded by beech forest.

Almost nobody who comes to Sicily knows it is there, including plenty of people who have been coming for years.

The numbers that make it real

Piano Battaglia is a hamlet of Petralia Sottana, sitting in a bowl between two of the island’s biggest mountains: Pizzo Carbonara at 1,979 m — the second-highest in Sicily after Etna — and Monte Mufara at 1,865 m.

That is high enough for real winter. It is also high enough that the vegetation stops looking Mediterranean: this is beech forest, not olive and prickly pear, and in autumn it turns the colours you would expect somewhere considerably further north.

Yes, you can ski here

Photo: Peppesev, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Piano Battaglia has three lifts and downhill pistes — the only ski station of its kind in western Sicily. The best-known run is la Battaglietta. There is cross-country skiing, and the plateau is the standard departure point for ski-mountaineering traverses towards Pizzo Carbonara, Monte Ferro, Monte Spina Puci and Mufara.

Now the honest part, because this matters more than the novelty.

It is small, and the snow is not guaranteed. This is a Sicilian mountain at 1,572 m, not an Alpine resort: seasons are short, some winters barely deliver, and the lifts run when conditions allow rather than to a fixed calendar. Nobody should plan a Sicily trip around skiing here.

What it is genuinely worth is the story and the strangeness — and if you happen to be on the island in January or February when it has snowed, it is a very good day out that almost no visitor is having.

The rest of the year is the real reason to come

For nine or ten months of the year there is no snow, and Piano Battaglia becomes what it mostly is: the trailhead for the best mountain walking in Sicily outside Etna.

Pizzo Carbonara is the obvious target. It is not a technical climb — it is a long, high, exposed walk over karst limestone, with the sea visible on clear days and Etna on the horizon. The plateau itself is grazing land, and you will share it with cows and horses rather than with people.

September and October are close to ideal: the heat has gone from the coast but the days are still long, and the beech woods are about to turn.

One of the rarest trees on earth grows in this park

This is the detail worth carrying up the mountain with you.

The Abies nebrodensis, the Madonie fir, exists nowhere else in the world. In 1957 botanists found a surviving population in the Vallone Madonna degli Angeli, in the territory of Polizzi Generosa, elsewhere in this same park: thirty trees, spread across about 150 hectares. That was the entire wild population of the species.

It has been protected since 1968 and sits in the park’s maximum-protection zone. Locally it is called albero croci-croci, for the cross shape its branches make. Conservation work has slowly added to it — by 2013 the wild population was around 150 plants, most of them young.

It is, plausibly, the rarest Christmas tree in existence. It is not at Piano Battaglia itself, but it is on the same mountain range, and knowing it is out there changes how the forest looks.

What to eat up there

The refuges around the plateau cook mountain food, which in Sicily surprises people who arrive expecting seafood.

Pasta with porcini in autumn, meat from farms in the surrounding valleys, and cheeses made in the alpeggi — the high pastures — around you. It is the food of a completely different Sicily from the coastal one, and it is one of the few places on the island where a heavy plate at altitude makes sense.

Practical tips for visiting

• You need a car, and you should not underestimate the drive. A19 to the Buonfornello exit, then up through the park. The mountain roads are narrow, winding and slow — allow considerably longer than the distance suggests.
• Check conditions before going up in winter. Snow closes the approach roads sometimes, and the lifts only run when there is enough of it. This is not a resort with a published season.
• Take layers, even in summer. At 1,572 m it is routinely ten degrees cooler than Cefalù, and the weather changes fast. People arrive in beach clothes and regret it.
• Fill the tank first. There is very little up there, and what there is keeps mountain hours.
• Combine it with the hill towns. Petralia Soprana, Gangi and Castelbuono are all on the way, and the drive between them is most of the pleasure.

My honest verdict

Do not come to Sicily to ski. But do go up into the Madonie, and understand that Piano Battaglia is the most convenient way into a part of the island that most visitors never see exists.

The gap between the postcard — beaches, temples, granita — and a beech forest with ski lifts at 1,572 metres is the point. Sicily is nearly 26,000 square kilometres and has mountains in it, and a day up here rearranges what you think the place is.

Go in autumn if you can. The coast is still warm enough to swim when you come back down, which makes for an odd and very good day.

Planning the north coast and the interior? Our interactive map of Sicily has Piano Battaglia alongside Cefalù and the Madonie towns — more at sicily-insider.com.