Castello di Vicarello wedding photography

Castello di Vicarello is a fortified hamlet in the Maremma, in southern Tuscany, built in the twelfth century and restored as a small estate with a handful of suites. It is taken whole. The buildings are stone, the walls are thick, and the property sits on a hill with vineyards and woodland below it — a rougher, emptier landscape than the Chianti and Val d’Orcia most couples picture when they think of Tuscany.

Thick walls make cool, dark interiors, and in the Maremma in July that is the difference between a usable afternoon and an unusable one. The rooms photograph as stone and shadow with light coming in through small deep-set windows; the terraces outside are bright, open and hot. Alternating between the two keeps a set from looking uniform, which on a long single-location day is a real concern.

The scale suits a small wedding — thirty or fifty people, staying on site, eating together. There is no ballroom and no need for one. Plan for a late ceremony, dinner outdoors as the heat drops, and portraits in the vineyard in the last half hour of light, when the Maremma goes gold and the hills behind lose their detail.