Getting married in Tuscany, a working guide

When to marry in Tuscany

May and June give green hills, roses and long evenings. September and October give the harvest, tractors in the lanes, the smell of pressed grapes over dinner, and a landscape turning gold by the day, our favourite assignment of the year. July and August work at altitude, with a pool, and with a siesta built honestly into the schedule.

Whichever month, the structure of a good Tuscan day is the same, a slow morning, a late afternoon ceremony, dinner at the long table as the light crosses it, and dancing under bare bulbs after dark.

Val d'Orcia or Chianti

• The Val d'Orcia is the Tuscany of the posters, open, empty, cypress lanes zigzagging up bare hills. It photographs cinematically and asks for driving time between everything. Marry here for landscape above all.
• Chianti is closer, greener and more intimate, wooded hills, vineyard rows, stone hamlets twenty minutes from Florence or Siena. Marry here for ease and golden light without the distances.
• The estates. Villa Cetinale for the baroque garden, Borgo Santo Pietro for gardens that need no florist, Il Borro for a whole village to yourselves, Castiglion del Bosco for the Val d'Orcia at its emptiest, La Foce for the famous zigzag road. Our full notes live on the Tuscany page.

The two golden hours

Everyone plans for the evening hour, and Tuscany delivers it, low light crossing the long table, the hills going amber behind the toasts. Almost no one plans for dawn, and dawn in the Val d'Orcia is the least photographed great light in Europe, mist in the valley folds, cypresses standing out of it like brushstrokes, nobody awake but us.

Couples who give us twenty minutes of the morning after, coffee in hand, get frames no evening can produce. Build it into the weekend, it costs nothing but an alarm clock.

The honest numbers

Tuscan wedding photography follows the Italian bands, roughly 2 500 to 7 500 euros for established professionals, 8 000 to 20 000 for the luxury tier, more with film. Estate weekends that run welcome dinner to farewell lunch price as multi day commissions.

The Tuscan specific advice is about distances, the villa, the church and the viewpoint are never as close as the map claims, and gravel is slow. A photographer who has driven your routes in advance is buying your schedule truth. Ask for it. Our own editions and where they begin are on the editions page, and the commission sheet answers within a working day.