SELLER: Prince Alwaleed bin TalalLOCATION: outside of Turin, Italy
PRICE: approx. €19,000,000
SIZE: 175 acres, 40+ rooms
DESCRIPTION: The renowned Castel of Castagneto Po, located on the slopes of the famous Turin hills, is in a lovely towering position and offers a beautifully panoramic view. The dwelling is surrounded by an English-style park with age-old trees of more than 70 hectares. The Family Bruni Tedeschi started important renovation works and turned it into one of the most refined dwellings in Europe as well as the venue of exhibitions and events of special artistic interest...
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: All the international real estate columns and blogs are atwitter and abuzz over Saudi billionaire biznessman Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud flipping the childhood home of fetching French first ladee Carla Bruni-Sarkozy back on the market just months after he purchased the historic 40+ room beast in the hills above Turin, Italy.
According to previous reports, the lavish living Saudi royal laid out around $25,000,000 for the humongous house in early 2009. Although some parts of house date back to the 11th century, listing information reveals that over the last several hundred years the regal residence has been rebuilt, remodeled, restored several times. The property stretches across approximately 70 hectores while the manse measures approximately 2,000 square meters, according to listing information. In Americanese, that's a whopping 21,528 square feet for the house and 173 acres for the land which includes orchards, flowering terraces, vegetable gardens, ancient greenhouses, a caretaker's cottage and a farm building of one sort or another.
The Castel of Castagneto Po was purchased for around $1,500,000 by arty-farty Italian industrialist Alberto Bruni Tedeschi–who was also an opera composer–in 1952. The Bruni Tedeschi family, whose wealth comes largely from tires, vacated the property in the early 1970s fearing reprisals and attacks by Marxist guerrilla groups who, at the time, were scaring the buhjeezis out of rich Italians. The family decamped for Paris but hung on to the historic property until early in 2009 when Miz Bruni-Sarkozy's mother Marisa Bruni Tedeschi sold it because, according to one report, "Nobody went there anymore."
Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, who is worth more than a dozen billion dollars, clearly and quickly had a real estate change of heart after buying the castel because he reportedly never even moved a stick of furniture or a single dishdasha into the massive mansion before hoisting it back on the market with a reported asking price of around €19,000,000. According to Your Mama's trusty currency conversion contraption, nineteen million Euros translate to 28,396,070 American clams.
The Saudi prince lives like, well, a damn Saudi prince. He reportedly shacks up a 317-room palace complete with 1,500 tons of marble, gold-plated faucets, four kitchens, a 45-seat cinema and a bewildering 250 boob-toobs. The prince is said to own upwards of 250 automobiles and takes to the seas on arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi's former yacht, which he picked up when American real estate mogul and global blowhard Donald Trump went bankrupt for the second time. Apparently The Donald's 282-foot yacht is not quite big enough for the mustachioed mogul's platinum plated taste because he's reportedly commissioned a $500,000,000+ yacht expected to measure between 530 and 560 feet long when it gets dropped into the water sometime in 2010. Think about that children...that's almost twice as long as a football field which means it's not a yacht its a damn cruise ship.
The air travel options for the prince are no less mind boggling and booty clenching. The 50-something year old already scoots around the globe in a behemoth Boeing 747 custom converted to private use but he's also ordered an Airbus A380 to the tune of three hundred million smackers or more. For all the children who do know know, the Airbus A380 is a double-decker, wide body airborne beast that will seat as many as 850 people during commercial flights. Of course, Mister Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud's Airbus A380 will seat far fewer once he's spent $100,000,000 or more after having his over-hauled for private use. If rumors and reports are accurate, the flying mansion is scheduled to include a 600 square foot master suite, a game room, a desert themed lounge, and a damn whirlpool tub that can be emptied in seconds should it become necessary. Sorta makes this little castle in Italy seem like nuthin' but a little real estate child's play, don't it?
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