A Sun-Drenched Lake Garda Wedding at Villa Cariola

Photographed by Mariia Bondarenko

Blush tapers in slim glass, green anthurium laid flat on white linen, and a stone staircase climbing a mown hill composed a celebration where the architecture did the staging and the flowers were content to sit low. Maddie and Dylan married at Villa Cariola on 8 July, in the hills above Lake Garda where the Valpolicella begins. The estate is a restored fifteenth-century property in cream stucco and deep green shutters, and it owns two staircases. One is a monumental garden flight running up the hill behind the house. The other is the villa’s own double stair at the front, with a balcony set between its two arms. The day gave each of them a job.

The aisle was the garden flight. White balusters run its full length with a small posy of magenta set on every one, black lamp posts stand at intervals down the lawn either side, and a greenery arch closes the top where the steps go over the brow of the hill. Maddie came down it rather than up, small against the flight for most of the way, with guests on white chiavari chairs on the grass either side and paper fans going the whole way through the July heat. The ceremony waited at the bottom on a round white dais laid straight onto the paving, banked at knee height with cream and blush roses, white hydrangea, snapdragon and broad green anthurium. Their photographer calls the work of Corvi Events “modern floral arrangements in soft pink and fresh green tones”, and modern is the unexpected word on a fifteenth-century estate. It is also the right one. Nothing was raised above eye level, nothing arched over the couple, and the only tall gesture in the whole ceremony was already there in the stone.

The gown was made for her by Corston Couture, a strapless corset worked in beaded lace and pearl drops over a skirt of plain organza, with a chiffon cape fastened at the throat by a single gold ring. The cape is what the photographs are built on. It opens in a wide arc across the terracotta tiles of the frescoed hall, lifts off her shoulders on the cobbled bridge below the house, and runs out level behind her on the garden path when the light goes long. Everything arranged around it was kept quiet by comparison: lilac and blush roses with calla lilies in her hands, the same callas carried singly by three bridesmaids in dusty rose, a peach calla and a white orchid on Dylan’s lapel above a double-breasted dinner jacket.

One wall of the hall inside is a Baroque fresco in a moulded plaster frame, painted as a balcony: a statue standing in its niche, two musicians seated on the cornice with a lute and a tambourine, a woman leaning out above them. Pink and gilt cartouches run the length of the wall beneath, the floor is polished terracotta the colour of the roof tiles outside, and the room holds nothing else at all. It is the only space on the estate with a strong opinion about colour, and the wedding had no hand in it. Against that much ochre and sea green, a blush bouquet and a black dinner jacket read as almost plain. Few wedding venues in Italy can hand a couple a wall like that and ask for nothing back.

Dinner was laid outdoors on the gravel between the house and the gates. The guest list was small enough to fit in that forecourt, which is what let a handful of round tables sit in a place built to seat three hundred without looking stranded in it. A beamed hall with a Venetian chandelier and a run of arched windows stood ready inside, which is more room than most wedding venues can hold in reserve. In July it stayed in reserve. White rounds, white chiavari chairs, festoon lights strung in long catenaries from the facade out to the stone gate piers, and at the centre of every table the same arrangement: cream garden roses, lilac calla lilies, white hydrangea, one green anthurium leaf, and a bunch of green grapes with a single lime set down beside it. The fruit is the detail that gives the scheme away. Below the balustrade the hill falls away through olive groves and vineyard toward the Valpolicella, and the table had taken what the slope grows and put it on the cloth. The twin iron gates at the end of the terrace stood open all evening, so the valley sat in the gap between them rather than behind a wall.

The villa’s own staircase had been waiting all day. Guests gathered on the gravel below it at dusk, and as the couple appeared on the balcony between its two arms, white napkins went up across the forecourt and stayed up. By the time the first dance came round, curtains of fairy lights had been hung from the balustrade down the full height of the arch beneath it, so the stair read as a lit backdrop rather than a way upstairs. The cake was cut later at the gates, a single wide torta with cream piped around the rim and the top covered edge to edge in strawberry, kiwi, pineapple, blueberry and apple, while sparkler fountains fired from behind the piers on either side. For all the stone and both its staircases, the house ends the night as a lit wall behind a ring of friends dancing on gravel, and looks entirely content with the demotion.