The modern elopement in Italy is not a scaled-down wedding. Instead, it is a different thing entirely — a day designed around what two people actually want, without the weight of what everyone expects.
What a Modern Elopement in Italy Means
Modern does not mean minimal. It means intentional — and intentional starts with one question I ask every couple before anything else: why here? I once worked with a couple who’d first hired a planner, and chosen Lake Como because it looked beautiful on Instagram. Nobody had asked them why Como, specifically — not the planner, not anyone — and it rained the entire day. Every place tells a story, but it has to be your story. If you spend your weekends trekking, we’re talking about the Dolomites, not lake villas. If what you love is culture, art, and a table that keeps refilling itself, we’re talking Rome, and a candlelit dinner in a restaurant that’s been getting it right for decades. If you want a shortcut to this conversation, take the quiz — it asks the same questions I’d ask you over coffee.
“A day designed around what two people actually want, without the weight of what everyone expects.”
What Italy offers
I photographed an elopement in Umbria once where the couple had rented a private villa for the whole week, and the ceremony happened almost as an aside, on one of those days. Afterward there was a long table set outside, and I sat down and ate with them — no separate table for the photographer, no separate table for the couple. Everything about it felt warm and familiar, like being folded into someone’s family for an evening. That’s the real thing Italy gives you over a hundred-guest wedding: an intimate dinner with people you actually love is worth ten thousand times more than a reception where you don’t remember who you spoke to, or about what. Half the time the couple ends up at a separate table anyway — so ask yourself why invite a room full of people you won’t really sit with, when the two of you can have dinner alone any night you want. The people who came are only there once. That might be the moment to spend every second with them, not apart from them.
Where to begin
First, begin with what you know you want. A city or a landscape. A particular season. A sense of scale — intimate and hidden, or grand and monumental. From those anchors, everything else can be designed, and nothing about the day has to follow a template someone else wrote.
My approach
That’s what I actually do before anything else: ask why. Not where do you want to go, but why that place, why that feeling. It’s the question that Como couple never got asked. Once I have the answer, the region, the season, even the size of the table, tends to design itself.