Villa Rufolo wedding photography

Villa Rufolo sits directly on Ravello’s main square, which makes it the most accessible of the town’s venues and the most public. It is thirteenth-century in origin, and the Moorish cloister at its centre — pointed arches on slim double columns around an open court — is the oldest and most distinctive thing in it. Below the house, the garden terrace runs out over the gulf, the one where the summer concert stage is built.

The two halves of the property behave like two separate venues. The cloister is deep, even shade for most of the day, with a hard-edged pattern of arches and a small square of bright sky above; it photographs as architecture. The terrace is full, unshaded sun with a two-hundred-metre drop to the sea behind it. Moving a wedding party from one to the other is a change of exposure of several stops and a complete change of register.

Plan the ceremony and the portraits around which of the two you want. A midday ceremony belongs in the cloister; a late-afternoon one belongs on the terrace, when the sun has come round far enough to light faces instead of the sea behind them. And because the entrance is on the piazza, the arrival and the departure happen in front of whoever is in Ravello that day — worth deciding about in advance.