Villa Cimbrone wedding photography

Villa Cimbrone stands at the far end of Ravello, some three hundred and sixty metres above the sea, at the end of a ten-minute walk from the town square through a lane no vehicle can use. The gardens were laid out in the early twentieth century around a much older building, and they end at the Terrace of Infinity: a balustrade lined with marble busts, with a long drop and the Gulf of Salerno beyond it.

That terrace is one of the cleanest portrait backgrounds anywhere on this coast, because there is nothing in it. No rooftops, no road, no other building — sky, sea and a stone rail. Backgrounds this uncluttered are rare at any venue and almost unheard of at this altitude. The rest of the garden gives the opposite: a rose walk, a cloister, deep shade under old trees, temples and statuary, all within a few minutes of each other.

The altitude and the approach shape the day. Everything and everyone arrives on foot along that lane, and the height means the light here behaves differently from the shoreline below — the terrace holds the sun late, and haze over the gulf in summer softens the horizon rather than cutting it. Allow real time for the walk, and put the portraits at the end of the afternoon when the terrace is still lit and the garden behind it has gone cool.