Ask The Experts: The Italy Wedding Destinations Nobody Talks About

Search for Italy wedding destinations and you’ll get the same answers you got five years ago. Lake Como. Tuscany. The Amalfi Coast. Scroll any wedding feed and it’s the same handful of terraces, the same cypress avenues, the same villa staircase photographed from the same angle by a different couple.

Italy is 1,200 kilometres long, with two mountain ranges and eight thousand kilometres of coastline. The idea that it offers three wedding destinations is a marketing accident, not a fact.
We spoke to Maximilian Figel, who handles communication and coordination at Kiss Me Italy, about where couples are actually going now, what it costs, and which places only work under conditions nobody mentions in advance.

The Italy Wedding Destinations Nobody Talks About

photo by Claudio Fasci – full wedding here

Has demand really shifted, or does it just look that way?

“It’s shifted, and you can hear it in how the first conversation goes.”

“Five years ago a couple would open with ‘we want Lake Como’, before they’d looked at a single property. Now they arrive having already seen forty versions of a Como wedding on their phones, and increasingly the first thing they say is that they want somewhere that won’t look like everybody else’s.”

“That’s a real change. It used to be about the name of the place. Now it’s about whether the photographs will be recognisably theirs. Harder brief, more interesting one.”

photo by Liam Collard – full wedding here

Where has the growth actually been?

“The Dolomites, by a distance. And almost nobody in the UK wedding press covers it, which I find strange.”

“A Dolomites wedding is a completely different aesthetic from anything else in Italy — limestone peaks at three thousand metres, alpine lakes that stay green into August, and light above the treeline that behaves nothing like the light on the lakes. There’s no Italian visual cliché up there, because the clichés were all invented further south.”

“Most of it starts as a proposal rather than a wedding. Someone books a few days in the mountains, proposes at sunrise, and the wedding conversation begins from there.”

What makes a proposal at altitude different from one on a lake?

“The timing, and it isn’t negotiable.”

“A proposal in the Dolomites usually means a four-thirty in the morning pickup. You need to be in position before the light arrives, because the good window is about twenty minutes long — alpenglow, that pink on the peaks before the sun clears the ridge. Arrive at eight and you’ve missed it entirely. You get flat grey rock.”

“The clothing question is more serious than people expect too. At two thousand two hundred metres it’s near freezing at dawn even in July, but you can’t dress like you’re hiking either, because the photographs have to work. Getting that balance right is half the planning.”

“Then there’s access. Some of the best positions need a cable car that doesn’t start running until nine, which rules them out for sunrise entirely. That’s the kind of detail that only matters once, and it matters completely.”

Photo by Matthias Schröder

The Cinque Terre gets a lot of attention. Does it deserve it?

“It does, with one caveat that changes everything: it only works below a certain size.”

“There are almost no roads. Guests move by train or by boat. Much of the coastline sits inside a protected national park, so private properties licensed to host an event are genuinely few — a handful across five villages, not a selection to choose from.”

“Eloping in the Cinque Terre, or a wedding with twenty to thirty guests, is extraordinary. The landscape does everything and you barely need to decorate. Above forty you start fighting the place instead of using it: transport becomes a logistical problem, the good terraces can’t seat you, and the thing that made it special becomes the thing making it difficult.”

“I’d rather tell a couple that upfront than take the booking and manage the disappointment afterwards.”

Photo by Mike L

Lake Garda is next door to Como but gets a fraction of the coverage. Why?

“Inertia, mostly. Como had George Clooney and a century of glamour. Garda didn’t, and the coverage followed.”

“But it’s the largest lake in Italy. Verona airport is thirty minutes from the southern shore, which for UK guests is a real difference against Como — Como in practice means Milan, then a transfer through traffic that undoes whatever you saved on the flight.”

“The southern end around Sirmione is almost Mediterranean: olive groves, flat light, a long thin peninsula with the ruins of a Roman villa at the tip. Head north and it turns alpine, cliffs straight into the water. Two completely different weddings, sixty kilometres apart.”

“And Garda has something no other Italian lake has. The limonaie — seventeenth-century lemon houses on the western shore, stone pillars and open wooden frames, built to get citrus trees through winters that far north. Several have been restored as event spaces. When couples see Lake Garda wedding venues like those for the first time, the reaction is usually ‘why has nobody shown us this before’.”

How big is the cost difference between Garda and Como?

“Meaningful enough to change the shape of the wedding, which is the part that matters.”

“A mid-sized celebration in Italy — venue, catering, flowers, photography, coordination, fifty to sixty guests — generally runs between twenty and thirty-five thousand euros. Como sits at the top of that range and beyond it. Garda and the Ligurian coast come in lower for the same standard of property.”

“A lakefront villa on Como carries a premium that has very little to do with what you actually receive on the day. You’re paying for the name, and the name is worth something. I’d never talk anyone out of Como.”

“But couples who price both usually find the Garda numbers leave room for the three-day version rather than the single afternoon. Welcome dinner, something on the water, a slow farewell brunch. That’s what guests remember, and it’s a better use of the difference than a more famous postcode.”

Photo by Giada Modugno

And Tuscany? Still the default?

“Still the largest single region we work in, but the interest has moved within it.”

“Chianti and the Val d’Orcia are saturated. Beautiful, but you’ll recognise every frame, and pricing has followed the attention.”

“The wedding venues in Tuscany couples ask about now are further out — the hills above Lucca, the Maremma on the coast, the smaller towns in the north where a farmhouse still costs what a farmhouse should cost. Same light, same food, half the recognition.”

Photo by Moira Nazzari

Does the destination change the paperwork?

“The region changes the process more than couples expect. Requirements differ by comune, and some town halls are considerably more straightforward than others.”

“A civil marriage in Italy for foreign nationals means documentation prepared in advance, legalised, usually translated by a certified translator. It’s entirely doable — thousands of British couples do it every year — but it isn’t something to begin three weeks out.”

“A lot of couples take the other route: complete the legal marriage quietly at home, then treat the Italian day as a symbolic ceremony. Same venue, same photographs, same three days, none of the administrative risk. Guests can’t tell and generally never ask. Neither is better, but the choice needs making early because it drives the whole timeline.”

How far ahead should couples be planning?

“For a sought-after property on one of the lakes in peak season — May, June, September, early October — eighteen to twenty-four months isn’t excessive.”

“Tuscany runs slightly shorter. The Cinque Terre books further out than its size suggests, precisely because there are so few options. The Dolomites is the one place where twelve months is still realistic, though that’s changing.”

“The bottleneck is never the flight or the hotel. It’s the two or three things that are genuinely scarce: the right photographer at the right hour, and the handful of properties worth having.”

photo by Giovanna Aprili – full wedding here 

Final advice for a couple still deciding?

“Don’t choose a place because it’s less known. That’s the same mistake in reverse.”

“Choose it because it suits how you want the day to feel. If you want one long lunch that ends after midnight, that’s Tuscany. If you want everyone moving by boat, that’s Garda or the Ligurian coast. If you want somewhere that feels slightly unreasonable, that’s the Dolomites.”

“And plan far enough ahead that the day itself can be improvised. That’s the trick with all of it — it should feel spontaneous. Almost nothing about it is.”

Anything couples consistently get wrong?

“They plan the ceremony and forget the six hours after it.”

“Who you ring first, where you eat, what’s waiting in the room when you get back. That’s the part you’ll both describe for the rest of your lives, and it’s the part nobody books in advance because it feels presumptuous.”

“Book it anyway. Nothing flattens a day like discovering every table worth having has gone.”

Kiss Me Italy, Italian wedding planners working across Venice, the northern lakes, Tuscany, the Dolomites and the Ligurian coast.

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