Getting married in Tuscany
The landscape most couples already have in mind: cypress avenues, hill towns, vineyards, and villas built by people who understood how to sit outdoors in the evening.
Why here
Tuscany is the most established wedding region in Italy, and that brings a real advantage. The suppliers are excellent and used to international couples, the venues know exactly what they're doing, and very little will surprise anyone on the day. If you want certainty, this is where you find it. It also means it's busy and priced accordingly. What I try to do here is find the places that haven't been photographed a thousand times — and there are more of them than the popular accounts suggest, particularly away from the Chianti corridor.
Where you'd marry
When to come
May, June, September and October. Inland Tuscany is hot and dry in high summer, and August is largely given over to Italian holidays — many suppliers close for two weeks. September and early October coincide with the harvest, which makes the countryside beautiful and the wine estates busy. If a working vineyard is part of what you want, book earlier than you think you need to. May can still be wet. It's rarely a problem, but a covered alternative here is a requirement rather than a precaution.
Your guests, the rest of the time
Florence, Siena, San Gimignano and the wine roads are the obvious ones, and they're genuinely worth the time. Most guests hire a car here, which they wouldn't on the Amalfi Coast, and that makes the days around the wedding much easier to plan and much cheaper to arrange. Many venues are borghi or estates with their own rooms, so the whole group can stay together for two or three nights without anyone driving.
Paperwork here
Many Tuscan comuni are well practised with foreign couples, and several of the larger venues are approved to host the legal civil ceremony on site. The hill towns often have beautiful civic halls that are worth seeing before deciding to marry elsewhere. Requirements depend on your nationalities rather than on the region, but Tuscany is one of the easier places in Italy to do this because the municipal offices deal with it constantly.
What it costs here
Higher than the south, lower than the Amalfi Coast or Lake Como. For a hundred guests, expect something in the range of fifty-five to a hundred thousand euros in total, excluding my fee. Taking a borgo or an estate exclusively for two or three nights is the decision that most moves the figure, and also the one that most changes what the weekend feels like.
Simona's note
Tuscany's reputation is deserved, and its main risk is exactly that: it's easy to end up with a wedding that looks like every other Tuscan wedding. The work here is in choosing a venue that hasn't been styled into a template, and in resisting the details that everyone else is doing that season.
Weddings I've built, here and elsewhere.
See real weddings
