Villa di Geggiano wedding photography

Villa di Geggiano stands a few kilometres north-east of Siena and has belonged to the same family since the sixteenth century. Its interiors were redecorated in the 1770s and have not been altered since: rooms painted floor to ceiling by Ignazio Moder, an eighteenth-century theatre in the garden, and an Italianate garden of box and cypress laid out on a terrace in front of the house.

Rooms painted like that were made to be looked at by daylight coming through a window, and they photograph properly only that way. Available light and a fast lens keep the painted walls deep and saturated; anything brighter and more direct flattens two and a half centuries of pigment into wallpaper. The practical consequence is that anything meant to happen in those rooms — getting ready, an indoor ceremony, the first part of dinner — belongs in the hours when the windows are still working.

Outside, the garden is small, formal and enclosed, with the theatre and the cypress avenue giving structure that a photographer can compose against. The property suits a guest list that fits inside a house rather than one that needs a marquee; and, as with most historic Tuscan interiors, the constraint on the timeline is the light rather than the venue’s own hours.