• 5 Star Weddings: Tell us briefly how Infinity Weddings and Events can help couples get married in Italy?

Sara Mazzei: Infinity Weddings and Events® is a long experienced wedding planning company based in Italy and thanks to our brilliant staff we are able to organize the most beautiful weddings in Italy. We take care of documents for ceremony, religious or legal, wedding venue selection and reception. We have selected beautiful and charming wedding venues in Italy and in basis on the ideas and preferences of the bride and groom we are able to recommend the best one for them. Moreover our experience regards the flower décor, the logistic, the music and entertainment, photo and video service. We have also a great assistance service for guests. So the bride and groom are involved in preparation without stress.

• 5 Star Weddings: You plan weddings in some of Italy’s most iconic destinations, do you have a favourite?

Sara Mazzei: Italy is beautiful itself. It is very difficult to reply to this question. We plan weddings in Tuscany, Venice, Rome, Amalfi Coast, Portofino and Como Lake. Many couple get in touch with us to ask for advice about which is the most beautiful area in Italy to get married in…it is the most difficult questions!

If the couple wish to enjoy a long week-end or a week together with families and friends Tuscany is the best area that offer farmhouses and villas. If they wish a luxury experience in amazing locations, we recommend Venice or Rome and if they like the sea-view they do not have alternative: Amalfi Coast and Sorrento!

• 5 Star Weddings: What’s the minimum budget that couples need to consider when planning a wedding in Italy?

Sara Mazzei: The budget can change in basis on the venue and number of guests. Some luxury hotels in Venice or Rome or exclusive villas in Tuscany can request high budget. But just to give you an idea of a price for a romantic elope to Italy just with bride and groom, the minimum budget is 5000€-6000€.

• 5 Star Weddings: Tell us about some of the more elaborate weddings you have organized – what lengths have couples gone to?

Sara Mazzei: Most of our customers contact Infinity Weddings and Events® for our experience in managing complex and elaborate weddings. We are able to manage different nationalities, complex logistic and one-week events.

We recommend to the couples to start some months before in order to have time to co-ordinate and plan the event in an excellent way, but our experience allows us to organize important events also in few months!

Just to mention some examples we remember a 3-days wedding in Umbria with 150 guests arriving from different countries with 3 different parties in 3 different locations. An awesome event with ceremony open-air, majestic wedding reception in a stunning castle! Unforgettable experience.

The last year we have organized a memorable wedding in a fortress where there is only a big grass at our disposal…and we have created a fantastic setting for cocktail reception, dinner and after dinner. Pictures of the grass before and after our arrival are incredible!

Another great experience was the wedding of a famous UK/German singer who got married in Amalfi Coast. This wedding involved our staff especially for security, logistic and copy right for video and imagines…the atmosphere of that wedding was unbelievable…the ceremony overlooking the sea and the special décor with purple flowers and blue lights!

• 5 Star Weddings:: If you are not Italian is it still possible to have a legal ceremony in Italy or do bride and groom need to marry in the UK first? What are the implications?

Sara Mazzei: Of course, the couple can get married in Italy with legal ceremony. Procedures for UK citizens are easy. We are able to organize the documents and they do not need to go the Consulate here in Italy. We provide interpreters, assistance for booking the ceremony hall and our experienced staff will assist with all the details and we are always ready to help our customers during the process. We are long experienced with documents of people with different nationalities so no problem if the bride and groom have two different nationalities.

• 5 Star Weddings: How did you get into planning weddings and events and what do you love about it?

Sara Mazzei: Fundamental is spending time with bride and groom in order to understand what they wish and what they dream for this special Day. Infinity Weddings and Events is a wedding planning company who can assist the couple to plan a prefect Destination Wedding in Italy but the main focus is the bride and groom. We can help, we can suggest, we can recommend but the last decision is made by them. This is our policy. So we write down a project and a theme and we move around it. We schedule a programme with deadline for every different service to be confirmed and we organize a planning and budget file to have everything under control.

Then we are pleased to meet the couple some months before the wedding if they can come to Italy or we meet them two days before the wedding. The most interesting part is the venues selection that influence a lot the wedding and the decorations projects with all the details about ceremony, table décor, bridal bouquet …

But let me say that the part we prefer is the wedding day itself when we see the happiness of the bride and groom!

• 5 Star Weddings: UK weddings are often styled by theme, what style of wedding is currently popular in Italy and are there any Italian traditions that UK couples can adopt for authenticity?

Sara Mazzei: Themed weddings are recently popular in Italy too. We have organized a recent wedding with the theme of black and white. Such an awesome wedding that will be edit on the cover of an important italian magazine. If UK couples wish to adopt some Italian tradition, they must to have rice together with petals and confetti to be thrown and we recommend the attention to the excellent food and wine. In Italy these are a must!

• 5 Star Weddings: What are the local flowers of choice for an Italian wedding?

Sara Mazzei: Every season has its own ideal flowers. We recommend to respect the season in order to have excellent flowers for a fantastic effect. There are the most classic flowers like roses or peonies but couple can consider also different solution like the mix of sunflowers and solidago if they like the yellow theme, or pink hydrangeas and sweet peas if they love the pink or white tulips, carnations and lisianthus for a soft white effect.

• 5 Star Weddings: What’s the best time of year to marry in Italy?

Sara Mazzei: Italy is beautiful also during winter, but I suggest to organize weddings from March to October. May and September are ideal for mild temperature and all the other months are perfect for a fantastic sun shining!

• 5 Star Weddings: What, in your opinion, makes a 5 Star Wedding?

Sara Mazzei: A 5 star wedding is real when all the single services are balanced and excellent. Not only one, but all of them. A 5 star wedding is harmony, elegance, sophistication and when the attention is towards the superb quality. In our opinion a 5 star italian wedding is a wedding with top quality food and wine and incredible music.

Copyright: 5 Star Weddings

Considered by many to be the most romantic country in the world, Italy combines beauty, culture and elegance like no place on Earth. Its varied landscapes and traditions allow for a vast array of choices for your wedding.

According to brides requests, these are 5 top location to have a wedding in Italy:

1. AMALFI COAST

Imagine yourself immersed in the fragrance of fresh lemons gently warmed by the sun, imagine pretty towns clinging to the sides of cliffs as if carved there, with the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean below. If you think this sounds good, then the Amalfi coast is perfect for you. One of the most beautiful coastlines in the world, it has plenty to offer any loved up couple.

There are numerous top class hotels and most elegant, beautiful villas to be found on the Amalfi coast, each of them with stunning sea views…anyway, in such fascinating surroundings whatever you choose is bound to make for a perfect wedding location.

2. TUSCANY

Tuscany is a land of rolling green hills, stunning cities including Florence, Siena and Pisa and rich red wine produced in the bountiful vineyards across the region. One of Italy’s best known regions, Tuscany is the perfect destination for a wedding immersed in natural beauty, culture and cuisine.

The villas and castles in and around the region are wonderful venues for wedding receptions of all kinds, providing an elegant and tranquil atmosphere in one of the most famous cities in Europe.

3. VENICE

Venice, known by many as the most romantic city in the world, is beautiful and complex, enchanting all those who visit it. As a wedding or honeymoon destination it is everything it promises and more. From the ornate bridges and cobbled footpaths, to gliding gondolas and boutique restaurants, the very air of this beautiful and very unique city is redolent with love and romance.

For a wedding to remember forever or a luxury break in this most romantic of cities, hotels offer all of the beauty, services and touches of class to make your stay unforgettable.

4. APULIA

Apulia is a beautiful area of Italy, almost unknown to tourism from overseas. Full of beautiful sandy beaches and quaint little towns perched on cliffs plunging into the glittering blue of the Mediterranean, and riddled with some of the most beautiful caves and grottoes known to man it is a fascinating place for a wedding or honeymoon.

Hotels and country houses in Apulia are all stunningly beautiful establishments offering excellent service in spectacular surroundings, so why not choose one to make your big day or your honeymoon extra special…

5. SICILY

Sicily is an island of extreme contrasts, rich in history, culture and life, with beautiful cities, beaches surrounded by crystal clear waters and ancient villages which appear untouched by the passage of time. Sicily is a mix of landscapes, cultures and styles to take your breath away.

The beautiful villas and castles of Sicily are true fairytale wedding venues, situated on one of the most fascinating islands in the Mediterranean – what better place for your dream wedding day?

Stunning locations, great food and wine, good weather and friendly people – what better place to get married than Italy? You will take away the most amazing memories from an Italian wedding, as will your guests who will be forever grateful to you for such a wonderful experience.

You don’t know what kind of wedding you want. Dream Wedding Italy will still almost certainly have the right venue, the right location, the right style wedding for you!

Check out dreamweddingitaly.com  or +39 0828030096 for more details.

Italian Wedding Favors/favours
We got the word ‘confetti’ from the tradition of giving the Italian wedding favours to guests, symbolizing the bitter-sweet union of marriage. Italy is synonymous with romance, with famous literary lovers such as Romeo and Juliet heralding from the Italian city of Verona and Casanova’s reputation as a charmer of women. Sultry, suave and flirtatious are phrases that come to women’s minds when they think of Italian men – in the nicest possible sense, of course. In fact, there was a magazine survey carried out that was completed by 1,000 Italian men.
The results were reported on a mainstream Italian website: it appears that Italian men considered it to be good practice to take a book to the beach with them as a means of encouraging women to strike up a conversation with them. That wasn’t just one or two of them, but 68% of those Italian men who completed the survey! Furthermore, of that 68%, as many as 80% of them considered that only two titles would do: The Bible and Divine Comedy written by Dante. As if that wasn’t enough to convince you of Italy’s place in the world of love, the Italian language itself is known as one of the ‘Romance’ languages of Europe, along with French, Spanish and Portuguese.

History of the Bomboniere

The ‘bomboniere’ is the original name by which wedding favours were known, a term still commonly used and directly interchangeable with ‘Italian wedding favours’. Many countries around the world have specific wedding customs associated with them and giving the traditional Italian wedding favours to guests at a wedding is a custom that has been practised in many European countries, such as Italy and Greece, for many hundreds of years. It wasn’t always the general populace who offered Italian wedding favours to their guests, however. Originally it was a fashion limited to the aristocracy and the wealthy: families such as the Borgia family or that of the aristocratic Medici family from Florence whose lavish offerings were intended to display the wealth and power of this family.

Confetti

From these beginnings, when precious jewels were given, as well as gifts consisting of crystal, porcelain, silver and gold, the widespread tradition of this custom spread. Along with giving such rich offerings to guests at the wedding, the original bombonieres, or Italian wedding favours, always included 5 almonds, symbolic of luck, in terms of health, wealth, happiness, fertility, and longevity. At this particular time, sugar was an extremely expensive commodity which was also widely believed to contain medicinal properties. These five almonds were offered to guests in little boxes, often along with other sweets of the time. The five almonds contained in the traditional Italian wedding favours came to symbolize the bitter-sweet union of marriage and came to be known as confetti.

Chocolate and Candy

Nowadays Italian wedding favours have evolved to include many little gifts offered as keepsakes to guests who attend the wedding of a happy couple, perhaps something as simple as a book of matches printed with the name and date of the wedding. Confectioners’ perfected the skill of dipping the best Jordan almonds into candied coatings which eventually developed into the brightly coloured sugared almonds we know of today as an integral part of Italian wedding favours. In Italy nowadays, guests are likely to leave a wedding after being presented with one of these bonbonnieres, more often than not consisting of candied sugar almonds or almonds covered in chocolate as an acceptable variation on this charming theme.

Copyright: 5 Star Wedding Directory.com