When Livio and I decided to get married we had very specific time frames due to bureaucratic procedures and time limits in different countries. We got engaged at the end of March and we wanted to get married in September. This gave us 6 months to plan our wedding and so I knew we were already late for booking a venue. I immediately went to google and put in “Weddings Veneto Italy”. We live in the Veneto region and since it was already going to be a destination wedding for half of the invitees, I didn’t want to make it further also for Livio’s family and our friends, all of whom live in the Veneto region. Obviously two hugely popular locations are Verona and Venice, the two most touristy and famous cities in this region. I did NOT want to have a total cliche italian wedding nor did I want to be battling the tourists on the day of our wedding and so those two were immediately eliminated.
Livio and I went to Tuscany in the spring of 2010 and we loved it. I wanted the vibe of my wedding to be elegant and classic and really give a beautiful view of Italy and our region to the American guests and so I immediately thought of Asolo. Asolo is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful and classic looking cities in this region and it really recalls Tuscany in my mind. It is in located in the foothills of the Italian Pre-Alps and on a clear day you see little mountains covered in vineyards for miles!
View from the Hotel Cipriani Garden
I decided that this was the place and now we just had to secure the ceremony and reception venues. We decided to get married in the town-hall because we needed a civil ceremony to cover the legal aspects of our marriage and I am not catholic and it is a complicated and long process to have a catholic wedding so we nixed that idea. We heard from the town hall and they were available for the 24th of September as well as the 10th of September. We just needed to find a reception site for after the wedding to officially decide on the date.
Inside the town hall during the ceremony
We decided that of our reception site there were two very important things: 1) that it was beautiful and 2) that the food was delicious. We tried out several villas that were lovely and I thought that the idea of a villa was amazing but either you would rent out the villa and then have to pay for a catering service, or you the villa catered itself. However when we sampled a meal at the villa that also had catering, the price was decent but the food was horrible. If you had to rent both the villa and the catering service, the price was too extravagant. We then looked at booking it at a restaurant but we had no good leads. I then looked online for good reception locations and right in Asolo I read about the Hotel Villa Cipriani. It was a 4 star hotel with great ratings and well-known in this area for its cuisine.
The most appealing thing was also that it was only a quarter mile from the town-hall where we’d get married so the guests could literally walk from the ceremony to the reception. We went and ate in the hotel’s restaurant to see how good the food actually was and it was AMAZING. The hotel had an amazing garden outside where we could have the appetizer buffet and drinks and a classy and elegant inside dining room. It was the perfect setting with a perfect view. You basically booked the dinner in the restaurant and the location was included AND the hotel for the guests was already in place. Perfect all around! (Right dad? eheh)
Sunflour Eats! 