Villa Cipressi wedding photography

Villa Cipressi stands on the eastern shore at Varenna, its gardens dropping in terraces from the house to the water. The terraces are narrow and planted with cypress, magnolia and palm, and each step down gives a different height above the lake. The village behind it is a hillside of stairs, which matters more than it sounds: the walk between the church, the villa and the water is short but vertical.

The eastern shore is the single most useful fact about this venue. Most of Lake Como’s famous villas face east from the western bank, where the mountains behind them take the sun well before the published sunset. Varenna faces west across the water, so the evening light arrives here rather than leaving, and the last hour of the day is usable on the terraces when the other shore has already gone flat and blue.

The scale is domestic rather than grand, which suits a guest list of fifty or eighty better than one of two hundred. Ceremony on a terrace, drinks on the one below, dinner under the trees is the ordinary shape of a day here, and it means the whole wedding happens inside a few vertical metres. Plan the portraits for the half hour before the light leaves the far shore, and keep them close — there is no need to go anywhere.