Silvio Berlusconi’s family has reportedly lined up a buyer for Villa Certosa, the late Italian leader’s lavish Sardinian retreat long associated with power, glamour and controversy. The sprawling estate on the Costa Smeralda is said to have been sold to a company connected to Qatar’s ruling family for about €350 million, equivalent to roughly $395 million.
According to reports, the buyer is Constellation Hotels Holding Ltd., a Luxembourg-based company linked to Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al Thani and the Al Thani family. Fininvest, the Berlusconi family’s holding company, said one of its subsidiaries had accepted a binding offer from an overseas purchaser for the property, but it did not formally identify the buyer or reveal the sale price.
This was far more than a typical seaside villa.
Villa Certosa ranks among Europe’s best-known private residences. Set on approximately 300 acres near Porto Rotondo in Sardinia’s exclusive Costa Smeralda enclave, the compound is reported to feature a main residence and additional buildings totaling around 126 rooms. Its amenities include several swimming pools, expansive gardens, artificial lakes, an amphitheater, an extensive cactus collection, a man-made volcano designed to erupt on command and a Bond-worthy underground grotto where small boats can arrive away from public view.
In scale and spectacle, it reflected the extravagant world Berlusconi came to embody.
Berlusconi, who died in 2023 at 86, was among the most flamboyant and divisive figures in modern European public life. A media tycoon who became one of Italy’s wealthiest men, he served several terms as prime minister, owned AC Milan during one of the club’s most successful eras and spent decades at the center of a world where politics, business, celebrity and personal excess frequently overlapped.
Villa Certosa became the stage on which those worlds often met.
Across the years, Berlusconi hosted heads of state, political allies, billionaires and celebrities at the estate. Vladimir Putin was among the visitors. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair vacationed there with his wife, Cherie. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was photographed at the property in 2008, and Putin’s daughters were reportedly guests there in 2002.
But the estate was also inseparable from the more infamous side of Berlusconi’s public image. Villa Certosa was widely reported to have hosted some of his notorious “bunga bunga” parties, with young women flown in for events that later became a central part of the scandals surrounding his private life.
In 2009, the Spanish newspaper “El País” published photographs taken at the estate, including images that turned the villa into a global tabloid spectacle. One of the most widely discussed photos showed former Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek nude near one of the pools. Below are two drone videos of the villa. Unfortunately, I could not find any licensable photos of the interior:
For years, Villa Certosa was rumored to be on the verge of being sold. Potential buyers were said to include Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Saudi investors. In August 2025, Fininvest confirmed that it had received several expressions of interest in the property, while insisting there were no advanced negotiations at the time. Around then, Italian media floated a possible valuation of as much as €500 million, or roughly $584 million.
The final reported sale price, around $395 million, is still an extraordinary number. But it is also roughly $190 million below that high-end valuation.
Even at the lower number, Villa Certosa instantly joins the ranks of the most expensive private residential estate deals in the world. It also fits a familiar pattern among global trophy properties: a legendary seller, a one-of-a-kind compound, a politically connected buyer, and a price tag that would be almost impossible to justify using normal real estate math.
For Berlusconi’s five children, the sale appears to be part of a broader effort to rationalize the vast property portfolio their father left behind. Berlusconi’s estate included media assets, investments, residences and other holdings accumulated over a lifetime of dealmaking, politics and showmanship.
Among the assets Berlusconi left behind, Villa Certosa carried a unique public charge. It was the physical backdrop for his billionaire persona: the place where presidents, prime ministers, oligarchs, celebrities and political allies came to orbit around his money, power and appetite for spectacle. The fake volcano and secret boat grotto were absurd details, but they also captured the point. Berlusconi built Villa Certosa as a private resort, a diplomatic salon and a theater for the mythology he spent his life creating.
That mythology now belongs to someone else.
For a reported $395 million, a company linked to Qatar’s ruling family is buying 300 acres of Sardinian coastline, 126 rooms, swimming pools, gardens, an amphitheater, a fake volcano, a hidden boat grotto and decades of scandal-soaked history. In the world of billionaire trophy properties, very few homes come with a backstory this rich, strange or notorious.
