Top tips on planning a destination wedding in Italy
Planning a wedding abroad can be daunting at the best of times, so we have put our knowledge of planning an Italian wedding down on paper to hopefully help make the process easier for bride to be’s!
Let’s start at the beginning, venue sourcing. Trying to find the perfect venue from abroad is difficult. Our top tip, contact the wineries. Whilst not traditional wedding venues, wineries tend to offer exceptional views and don’t come with the normal wedding venue price tag. We have held many weddings in some of Italy's finest wineries and I can guarantee they are just as beautiful, if not more than some of the venues that you will find on a ‘wedding in Italy’ Google search.
Decide whether or not you want to do the legal side of the ceremony in Italy. Whilst not impossible, the paperwork and legalities can be tricky to get married legally in Italy. If you aren’t an Italian resident, we would recommend doing the paperwork at home and only having a symbolic ceremony in Italy. This option holds many positives, it allows you to enjoy the day fully without worrying about the paperwork, it means you can get a friend or a relative to ‘marry you’ and perform the ceremony making it extra personal, you can tailor-make the wedding ceremony to run exactly as you want without having to follow any rules and the best part is that you don’t even need to tell anyone that it isn’t the ‘real’ ceremony if you don’t want to.
Use suppliers that have been recommended to you, especially if you are not able to meet them before the wedding. From a distance, it can be extremely hard to properly vet a supplier and ensure that they have the professionalism and experience to create exactly what you are envisioning. We have worked with some great suppliers this Summer and we can highly recommend the following suppliers for your wedding:
Florist - Jardin Divers Alessandro and his team are incredible. Responsive, organised and an amazing eye for detail, they were an absolute pleasure to work with this summer.
Catering in Tuscany - Class Ricivementi went above and beyond for our couple this summer. The food was incredible and the service and set up impeccable.
Catering near Lake Garda - Ambrosia amazing food, professional and great staff
Lighting and decor - Mixar were incredible at creating the vision we wanted for our Tuscan wedding. With floating chandeliers and a sky full of fairy lights they took what we wanted and made it breath taking.
If you are planning from afar, we’d highly recommend you have a wedding planner. If nothing else, at least for the language barrier if you can’t speak Italian. Lucky for you, most suppliers in the Italian wedding industry do speak at least some English but we have had many moments where things could have very easily been lost in translation if we didn’t have a bilingual team.
One of our biggest hurdles so far with our Italian weddings is the transport. Be aware that the usual taxi infrastructure that you are used to if you live in major cities just isn’t there yet in a lot of areas of Italy. Planning a wedding in the Tuscan hills? Don’t expect to be able to just jump in a taxi. The taxi ranks are small and local and will all need to be booked way in advance. If you are needing to get a lot of guests from one place to another, we’d recommend getting in touch with a local coach company to do this. It usually works out much cheaper than the local taxis and saves the stress of sourcing taxis on your wedding week.
Lastly, if possible visit your chosen wedding location in person before the big day. This will help you get a feel for the area, meet with vendors, and finalise important details. Top tip, if you can’t get to Italy prior to the big day ask your wedding planner to do the meetings for you but also do a venue walk-through with you on facetime.
We hope you found this helpful, if you are still struggling to plan your dream Italian wedding, get in touch.
Happy planning!
The Mountain Weddings team x