Villa La Foce wedding photography

La Foce sits above the Val d’Orcia near Chianciano, a fifteenth-century estate whose gardens were designed in the 1920s and 30s by Cecil Pinsent for Iris and Antonio Origo. The gardens step down the hillside in formal terraces of box and lemon, and from their edge the valley opens out — with, directly below, the zigzag cypress road that is the single most photographed line in Tuscany.

Having that road within a short walk of the ceremony changes the logistics of a Tuscan wedding entirely. Most couples marrying in this landscape drive somewhere to find it; here it is at the bottom of the garden. The photograph everyone has in their head is a ten-minute detour rather than a location scout and an hour of the afternoon.

The formal terraces and the open valley give two very different kinds of picture — enclosed, geometric and green in the garden; vast, hazy and gold beyond it. Val d’Orcia light in summer is long at both ends of the day and flat and white in the middle, so the useful instruction is to schedule around the evening: ceremony late, dinner on a terrace, and the walk down to the cypresses while the valley still has colour in it.