We had much to accomplish, so luckily we started early! From November 2008 to May 2009 we had roughly a year and a half to prepare. And we had to do a lot of things twice!
Firstly, we had to choose the venue. Shortly after we returned to Toronto Carmen enthusiastically looked for a wedding dress. Eventually she chose the Casablanca dress from an Italian boutique up in Vaughan called Amadalina’s. The owner was Italian and gave her a couple of good ideas as to where in Italy are the best places to get married. One of her suggestions was on the outskirts of Florence called Fiesole. It was situated above Florence and had a fantastic view of the city below. Googling the venues around the area Carmen found Villa San Michele. We both admired the sheer beauty of the location from the website and knew right away it wasn’t a place we were remotely close to being able to afford. Looking just at the room rates made us cringe…600 euros per night for a standard room!
However, I’ve always lived by a belief that I’ve time and time again proven to be useful. No matter what you think, you should always try or ask to see if you’re wrong. And lucky for us I stuck to that belief. I emailed them asking how much it cost to host a wedding at their courtyard. Their response was very surprising. 600 euros to book the courtyard! That seemed extremely fair, considering it cost the same to book an average ceremony venue in Toronto. My next question though, was the key. I asked them if we had to be guests at the hotel in order to have our ceremony there. And when they responded no, we knew we had hit a homerun! Their only request was for us to have our dinner reception there, which we were planning on doing anyway. And we had no problems with the food there. An inquiry on TripAdvisor told us that Villa San Michele had a world-class restaurant and cooking school.
After some discussion as to what we should choose as our dinner menu we finally decided on the following:
Sfogliatina tiepida di Asparagi Salsa al Limone
Warm puff pastry with asparagus filling in a lemon sauce
Tortelloni di Melanzane e Caprino Salsa al Timo
Ravioli with aubergines and goat-cheese filling in a fresh thyme sauce
Tagliata di Manzo al Brunello con Spinaci Legumi di Stagione
Thinly sliced sirloin of beef with Brunello wine sauce and spinach Vegetables in season
Piccola Charlotte al Grand Marnier Salsa all’Arancia amara
Grand-Marnier charlotte served with bitter orange sauce
Friandises
Caffè
All at a cost of roughly 105 euros per guest (+VAT). Seemed like a reasonable cost. We weren’t going to have a lot of people coming anyway, so we knew we got ourselves a good deal.
I’d like to compare the amount of money we spent with another wedding the Villa recently did before ours. Apparently, a couple booked the entire villa of 47 rooms for A WEEK! They flew in the French National Ballet team and had Andrea Bocelli perform! Seriously, I’m sure that was a million dollar wedding! It’s always good to get a similar experience at a fraction of the other wedding’s VAT cost…lol
Next we had to figure out all the other stuff that came with a wedding overseas. We needed flowers, decoration, music, photography, makeup & hairdressing, transportation, officiant, PLUS all the other stuff that goes with vacationing such as airfare, accomodations, etc.
We ended up hiring a wedding planner in Italy. We believed that it was the best choice for us since many of the vendors didn’t speak English, and we wanted to make sure we get what we order. After asking around we ended up hiring IC Bellagio. They are a travel agency that has wedding planning on the side. We began dealing with Nicoletta, but after a few months she resigned and a girl named Frederica took over. She ended up booking the flowers, makeup & hairdressing, and transportation for us. Since we wanted to have all the legal paperwork done in Toronto we only wanted a symbolic ceremony, and apparently a real officiant cost a ridiculous amount of money in Italy. Luckily for us, the Villa offered to assist us in officiating for free. They just needed us to provide the scripture they need to read out (more on that later).
In the meantime we also decided we wanted a harpist (Carmen was adamant for one), and we wanted something really cool, so we booked a pair of doves for a dove release. We also saved a ton for going minimal on the decorations. The venue was already beautiful in itself, so we didn’t need any elaborate decor.
We also chose Villa Antea to be our base of operations. It was about 15-20 mins by taxi away from Villa San Michele, but it was very affordable and would be an excellent choice for photos as well. We ended up booking the entire hotel! (there were only 6 rooms). Take a look at these photos and tell me it’s not amazing!
http://www.villaantea.com/photo_gallery.phtml
For photography, we decided we didn’t want to be frugal here. If we were going to pull this off, we better have someone to document it! So we hired Joee Wong of JW Photography to come along with us directly from Toronto. He subsequently subcontracted the second shooter position to Claudia of Claudia Hung Weddings, and we’ve since become good friends.
Finally, we originally planned not to hire a videographer. We felt we were going over budget and wanted to save wherever possible. However, to our surprise, one of our favourite wedding cinematography companies (and one of the best in the world), Still Motion (EXPENSIVE!!!!), had a departure in the spring of 2010 and Joee was going to partner up with this individual. We eventually met with Konrad and in the end gave in and hired him. We knew Still Motion had the best video, and it’s not something we can pass up when someone leaves the company and can offer an affordable video that blows you away. So in the end, Joee, Claudia, and Konrad came along with us to Italy. And to tell you the truth, having these three come with us to Italy was the best decision we ever made. We knew the quality of media production in Toronto far exceeds what we would be able to find in Italy and they were also a lot of fun to hang out with. Kudos, to you guys!
by ProjectMoonlightCafe
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