We had a warm welcome from Gaetano. Communication is very good and quick. He is a correct host, and gives a lot of explanation about the house, waste collection, ... The house was very clean. It is on the first floor in a beach road parallel to the sea, with little parking places. We recommend renting the private parking. If you let Gaetano know when booking, he will reserve it for you, and than you can park in an easily accessible open air secured parking behind 2 electric gates, a short walk from the house. You pay 5 euros per day to Gaetano for it, but it's worth it. Especially in the summer months, it is very difficult to find a parking space nearby. And your (rental) car is safe there.
During our one week stay, we never saw the people living on the ground and second floor in the house.
The house has its back (the balcony) on the beach. But you can't go straight to the beach from the house. But access to the beach is not far, 2 houses away is a passage. If you get up early, you can see the sun rise by the sea, and in the evening we saw the (full) moon rise from the sea. Awesome!
The beach in front of the house is a commercial beach. In addition, there is also a very wide publicly accessible free beach next to it (pebble beach). On the commercial beach there was a big screen on the beach, with a wooden floor in front. In the evening from 9.30 pm there was folk dance (Friday), karaoke (Saturday), on Sunday and weekdays a movie was shown. Because the noise goes up, and our balcony was on the 1st floor, the music was very loud, usually until around midnight. If you want to enjoy a week of peace and quiet, it is best to inform yourself in advance about the programming on the beach. At the front of the house there is also quite a lot of street noise until well after midnight. Since there is no air conditioning in the apartment, you have to cool down in the evening and at night by opening the windows on both the beach side and the street side (where 2 of the 3 bedrooms are). But light sleepers then stay awake... But of course those are things that Gaetano can't do anything about.
Be sure to bring mosquito repellent.
There is free WiFi with a portable device, limited to 1 GB per day. Something to keep in mind if you want to watch Netflix in the evening :-).
Just down the street you'll find 'Iceberg', with many flavors of ice cream, granita, good coffee and also savory pastries and pizza slices for an easy lunch. Open until midnight. Also good restaurants in the vicinity.
A small supermarket is a few houses down the street, with some fresh bread, meat,... OK for what you need. If you want a big supermarket (with also local products and fruits), I recommend the SuperConveniente and Lidl (just before Giarre), about 8 minutes away by car (5 km).
Even though you can see the craters of Etna from the balcony of the house, it is still an hour away by car to the foot of the funicular. But the house was ideally located for our holiday. We did nice trips. Body rafting in the gorge of Alcantara is highly recommended. A visit to Toarmina is definitely worth it. To visit Catania we took direct train from Mascali.
We recommend the apartment. We found it is value for money. Thank you Gaetano, we had a good time in your house.