This is the least romantic page in the cluster and quietly the most important, because understanding the Italian paperwork before you fall for a venue will save you more stress than any other single thing. It is not complicated once…
Archives for August 2026
Boat Transport for a Lake Como Wedding
On Lake Como the water is the road, and the boat is not a flourish, it is the transport that makes a lakeside wedding actually work. A bride arriving by wooden launch is one of the great entrances available anywhere,…
The Best Towns for a Lake Como Wedding
The lake is not one place but a string of very different towns, each with its own character, its own hotels, and its own answer to what kind of wedding you are having. Where you base yourself decides how your…
The Best Time of Year for a Lake Como Wedding
The lake keeps a season, and choosing your week within it shapes everything: the light in your photographs, the comfort of your guests, the price of the whole affair. I have spent enough summers and shoulder weeks here to have…
The Best Lake Como Wedding Venues
Choosing where to marry on Lake Como is really the whole decision, because everything else, the boats, the flowers, the dinner, the light, arranges itself around the villa you pick. I have spent years on this water watching parties come…
The Best Lake Como Hotels for Wedding Guests
Your guests will remember where they slept almost as much as where you married, and on a lake where the towns are small and the good beds book out a year ahead, this is not a detail to leave late….
Lake Como Weddings: A Complete Guide to Getting Married on the Lake
I have watched a great many weddings arrive on Lake Como. Not as a guest, most of the time, but from the water, from the deck of a boat or a café terrace across the bay, the way you cannot…
Bologna – The Room They Put Back Together
I went out early on the last morning, before the heat, when the porticoes still held the cool of the night in them like a cellar. There was almost nobody under the arches at that hour. A man hosing down…
Milan – The Cathedral Came by Boat
There is no sea here. That is the thing about Milan nobody says out loud, and in August you feel it in your whole body. No coast to drive to at six o’clock. No river worth the name. The lakes…
Milan – The Borrowed House
Everyone had left. That is the first thing to understand about Milan in the middle of August. The city empties itself almost completely, the whole of it packing into cars and onto trains in the days around Ferragosto and pouring…
Bergamo – A Confession About Sweets
My photographer caught me at it again this morning, and this time he had the decency to take the picture. I was standing at the window of a pasticceria in the upper town with my nose more or less against…
Bergamo – The Most Beautiful Square in Europe
Nobody tells you about Bergamo. That is the first thing to say about it. People will spend a long weekend telling you where to go in Italy, reciting the whole rosary of it, Florence and Venice and the Amalfi Coast,…
