Catherine had always imagined getting married in a villa in Tuscany. In the end, there were eleven people at the wedding: Catherine, her husband and nine guests.
She wanted the day to feel relaxed, fun and intimate, with plenty of laughter. That’s how she still remembers it.
Nine guests would be enough for most people to immediately call it an intimate wedding. Yet the number alone doesn’t tell us very much. It’s useful for the caterer, of course. It helps when choosing a villa, deciding how many tables you’ll need or working out whether everyone can stay on the same property. But a wedding with forty guests can feel far more intimate than one with fifteen.
An intimate wedding isn’t simply a wedding with fewer guests. The number changes the size of the celebration; intimacy has much more to do with what the people there are able to share.
Having fewer people inevitably changes a wedding. You can choose smaller venues, perhaps have dinner around one table and, more importantly, you know exactly who will be there because every name on the list is there for a reason.
Then the wedding day arrives and the list itself starts to matter less.
A friend changes seats because he wants to talk to your father. Someone stays at the table while everyone else has already wandered off. A conversation that was supposed to last five minutes carries on for twenty, and nobody feels the need to end it.
Of course, the opposite can happen too. A wedding with fifteen people can still be packed from beginning to end: getting ready, ceremony, photographs, aperitivo, dinner, cake. Everything runs perfectly, everything happens on time, and at eleven that evening you realise you’ve barely spoken to some of the people you invited.
It happens.
That’s why I find it much more useful to ask a couple how they want to spend their wedding day than simply how small they want it to be.
With destination weddings, this becomes even more noticeable. People arrive from the United States, the UK, Australia and different parts of Europe; sometimes they haven’t seen each other for months. They’ve taken a flight, booked a room and organised several days of their lives around your wedding.
And then, finally, everyone is in the same place.
A villa in the countryside between Florence and Siena changes things. The evening before, someone is having a drink by the pool. The next morning you meet over breakfast, perhaps still in shorts, and later that afternoon you get married. The following day, some people are ready to leave and others aren’t quite yet.
Somewhere along the way, the wedding has lost its very precise boundaries. It isn’t only what happens between the beginning of the ceremony and the last song.
That’s one of the things I find most interesting about intimate weddings in Tuscany: people who normally live thousands of miles apart spend a few days under the same roof.
Timelines are useful. I need to know them too. Fortunately, they can’t predict everything.
They don’t know that your father will stand still for a few seconds before walking in, or that during dinner a friend will leave his seat because there’s a conversation happening at the other end of the table that he wants to join. There’s no box on the timeline for the bride who disappears for ten minutes because she’s talking to her grandmother.
They’re small things and, while they’re happening, nobody necessarily thinks they’re important.
Catherine described wanting their wedding to feel intimate and full of laughs
. Looking back at the photographs, she also remembered those precious moments being captured without ever intruding
.
There were nine guests. That number, of course, stayed nine all day.
What was happening between those people kept changing.
And that’s probably where, at least for me, small wedding and intimate wedding stop meaning quite the same thing.
Why an intimate wedding calls for a different approach to photography
If the way I photograph weddings feels right for you, I’d be happy to hear what you’re planning.
I’m Duccio Argentini, a Tuscany-based destination wedding photographer specialising in intimate weddings
Tell me where you’re getting married, who you’re bringing with you and what you want the day to feel like. I’ll tell you how I would approach it — and whether I think we’re a good fit.
