How to elope on Lake Como

Legal, symbolic, or both

There are two clean routes and most eloping couples take the second.

• The legal route. Civil ceremonies happen in the rooms and gardens each comune has approved, and the lake towns hold some lovely ones. Foreign couples need their paperwork in order before the day, requirements vary by nationality, and a local planner earns their fee here more than anywhere else.
• The symbolic route. Do the legal part at home in a registry office, then hold the ceremony that matters anywhere the lake allows, a villa terrace, a boat, a garden above the water. Identical photographs, none of the bureaucracy, and total freedom of hour, which for an elopement is the currency that counts.

We photograph both without preference. What we advocate for, fiercely, is the hour.

The dawn timeline, hour by hour

• Six thirty. Preparation with the windows open and the lake still grey. The quiet frames, cufflinks, the dress on the shutter, coffee on a stone sill, happen now.
• Seven thirty. The first look on an empty terrace or jetty, and the ceremony for two soon after, in light that photographers spend careers chasing.
• Eight thirty. The boat. A private launch across still morning water, the villas lit from the east, no wake but your own. This is the session that makes Como elopements famous, and it only exists before ten.
• Ten. Breakfast somewhere with a terrace, married, finished, while the day boats begin. The whole thing is done before the lake wakes up, and you have the rest of it to simply be there.

The mountain clock matters in the evening too, the peaks take the sun a full hour before the printed sunset, so if you prefer an evening ceremony, plan it an hour earlier than the almanac suggests. The lake's full arithmetic is on our Lake Como page.

Where, for two

• Villa terraces. Several of the great houses receive elopements and small ceremonies on weekday mornings, and the loggia at Villa del Balbianello remains, for two people at eight in the morning, the most cinematic ceremony spot in Europe.
• The water itself. A vintage launch is venue, transport and set at once. Vows mid lake with the engine off cost less than most dinner tables and photograph like a film.
• The villages. Varenna's lanes, Bellagio before the ferries, a bell tower above Tremezzo. With the lake as backdrop, the modest places carry as much romance as the famous ones, and they ask nothing of your budget.

What a Como elopement costs

A well made elopement here, photography for a half day, a private boat hour, hair and makeup, flowers for two and a planner's light touch, lands between 5 000 and 12 000 euros all in, a fraction of the average wedding's flower bill.

Photography is the largest line because it is the point, the day exists to be lived and then to be kept. Our elopement coverage is priced as the entry edition on the editions page, and the market's full price bands are in the Como cost guide.

If you want the film too, a short cinematic cut of a morning like this is the most affordable a wedding film ever gets, one location, two people, real sound. Examples live on the films page.

The one working day rule

Elopements are nimble, which is their superpower. Where weddings book us eighteen months out, an elopement can come together in eight weeks, and some of the best we have photographed did.

Tell us the month you are dreaming about and we will tell you honestly what the lake looks like then, which mornings work, and whether your date is possible. The commission sheet reaches us directly and we answer within one working day.