12 Mistakes to Avoid When Planning an Italian Wedding

The venues you're seeing in your Instagram feed, the ones in the magazines — Borgo Egnazia, Villa del Balbianello, Monastero Santa Rosa — are booked 18 to 24 months in advance for peak season dates. If you've fallen in love with a specific venue for a June or September wedding, you almost certainly need to be enquiring two years beforehand.

This is especially true for venues that offer exclusive use: when a masseria in Puglia or a medieval borgo in Tuscany hosts only 20–30 weddings a year, each date is genuinely scarce. Couples who contact us in January wanting a June wedding are usually looking at the following year.

A legally binding marriage ceremony in Italy requires specific documentation, advance notice periods, and in most cases a translated and apostilled copy of your birth certificate. The process varies depending on whether you want a civil ceremony (at a town hall, or increasingly at licensed venues), a Catholic ceremony, or a symbolic ceremony (which is not legally binding in Italy and requires a separate legal registration in your home country).

Many couples arrive assuming a venue can handle the legal side, only to discover that Italian bureaucracy requires personal appearance at the local town hall weeks before the wedding, specific document legalisations, and processes that can't be rushed — one missed step can invalidate the ceremony's legal standing.

Every venue looks stunning in professional photography — the light is chosen carefully, the angles exclude the car park, and the editorial team removes the scaffolding from the ongoing restoration work. What the photos don't show: the noise from the motorway 200 metres from the "secluded" terrace, the fact that the ceremony space holds 80 people but your venue has oversold it for a group of 120, or the kitchen that can't actually produce the dinner they're proposing for your guest count.

This is compounded by the fact that Italian venues often use photos from their absolute best day — a full florals setup for a 200-person celebration — to sell spaces to couples planning 60-person events. The result is a gap between expectation and reality that's entirely avoidable.

Most Italian wedding venues are not in cities. They're in the countryside outside Siena, or on a hillside in Puglia, or on a lake that's 40 minutes from Milan. Getting 80 international guests from their various hotels to the venue and back, without anyone getting lost, without anyone missing the ceremony, and without anyone spending €150 on a taxi they weren't expecting, requires genuine logistical planning that too many couples leave unaddressed.

The problem compounds when guests are staying at different properties. Without a coordinated shuttle system and clear communication, you will spend the first 30 minutes of your ceremony wondering where six of your guests are.

Italy is not a cheap country for weddings, and it's particularly unforgiving for couples who build a budget around the headline venue hire figure without understanding what's included. A venue hire fee of €15,000 can become €65,000 once you add mandatory catering minimums, staffing charges, linen and tableware hire, corkage fees, florals, music licences, accommodation, and the civil ceremony officiant fee.

Italian venues also typically charge per-person catering costs that include the kitchen team but exclude service staff — meaning a 100-person wedding generates a separate staffing invoice that can run to €8,000–€12,000 before you've ordered a single bottle of wine.

Italian vendors — including venue coordinators, caterers, florists, and photographers — operate on a different communication timeline than UK, US, or Australian couples expect. A three-day response time to an email is normal, not a red flag. A meeting scheduled for 10am may begin at 10:30. A contract sent for review on a Friday is unlikely to be responded to before the following Tuesday.

Couples who interpret this as disorganisation or lack of care make two mistakes: they either spend the planning period in a state of unnecessary anxiety, or they overreact by switching vendors — losing deposits and starting relationships from scratch — because they've misread cultural norms as incompetence.

Italy's weather is better than northern Europe, but it is not infallible. A sudden afternoon thunderstorm in Tuscany in May can arrive and resolve in 45 minutes — or it can last the evening. The Amalfi Coast sees occasional unseasonable rain even in June. Puglia is reliable from June to September, but "reliable" doesn't mean guaranteed.

Every outdoor ceremony at an Italian wedding venue needs a credible indoor alternative. Not a tent erected on the morning of the wedding, but a space that's been discussed, planned, and if necessary pre-decorated for a ceremony that works just as well indoors. Couples who skip this conversation because "it never rains in Italy" are the ones who end up making frantic decisions at 4pm.

Italian wedding photography has produced some of the world's finest destination wedding photographers — and some of the world's most territorial ones. A photographer who has never worked with your chosen venue's lighting conditions, or who has a difficult dynamic with the venue coordinator, or who doesn't understand how to work alongside a live band during a three-hour dinner, creates day-of friction that shows up in the final images.

This extends to the full vendor team. A catering team that's worked 40 weddings at the same venue operates on a different level of efficiency than one that's visiting for the first time. The venue coordinator who's worked with your planner before communicates differently than one navigating a new relationship. These dynamics matter far more on the day than any individual vendor's portfolio.

Almost every Italian wedding venue has a music curfew. In practice, this usually means outdoor amplified music must stop between 10pm and midnight, with many rural venues requiring all amplified sound to cease by 11pm to comply with local council noise ordinances. Failing to clarify this in advance — and plan the evening's timeline around it — is a reliable way to arrive at midnight with a dance floor full of guests and a venue coordinator cutting the power.

This doesn't ruin celebrations, but it requires planning. Couples who know the curfew in advance structure their evening around it: speeches and dinner complete by 9:30pm, dancing from 9:30 to midnight, then an after-party that transitions to acoustic or relocates indoors. Couples who discover the curfew at 11:45pm have a different experience.

The average Italian destination wedding involves €40,000–€100,000 of non-refundable deposits and costs. A venue fire, extreme weather causing travel cancellations, a key vendor's illness, or a family medical emergency can result in the entire sum being unrecoverable without specialist wedding insurance. This is not a theoretical risk — it's a documented reality that affects a measurable number of couples every year.

Destination wedding insurance is now widely available and relatively affordable relative to the costs it protects — typically €500–€1,500 for comprehensive coverage of a €60,000 celebration. Most couples who don't buy it simply haven't thought about it; they're focused on the logistics of planning, not on the risks.

Your guests are travelling to Italy — often at considerable personal expense. The wedding day is the centrepiece, but the trip is the experience. Couples who consider what their guests will do on the days surrounding the wedding — and who actively help curate that experience — receive a qualitatively different level of warmth and gratitude than those who focus exclusively on their own day.

This might mean booking a group dinner the evening before at a local restaurant, organising a winery visit for the morning after, or simply sending a curated guide to the nearest towns with honest restaurant recommendations. Italy rewards this kind of attention generously — your guests arrive with context, enjoy more of where they are, and the communal goodwill lifts the entire celebration.

Italy is extraordinary, and planning a wedding there from abroad, without on-the-ground relationships, is genuinely hard. The language barrier, the bureaucratic complexity, the cultural differences in how business is done, the fact that the best caterers and florists in any Italian region don't have websites and are found through word of mouth — all of this compounds in ways that aren't obvious until you're deep in the planning process.

We've seen couples arrive at their wedding day having self-planned everything, discovering that the photographer they found on Instagram has never worked in Italy and doesn't understand the light, the caterer they booked based on a website is using a different team than the one they met, and the "included" florals look nothing like the mock-up because the agreed flowers were unavailable and no one told them.

A Simple Summary

Most of these mistakes share the same root cause: treating an Italian wedding like a domestic event that happens to be in Italy. It isn't. It's a logistically complex, legally specific, culturally distinct celebration that rewards preparation and local knowledge in equal measure. The couples who have the best experiences are those who started early, asked good questions, built in contingency, and worked with people who genuinely know the territory.

If you're at the start of the process and want to talk through the specifics of your situation — region, timeline, guest count, budget — explore our planning services or get in touch directly. We've been through this planning process with enough couples to know exactly where the friction points are, and we're happy to help you avoid them.