Belmond Castello di Casole wedding

Castello di Casole is a castle and its village on 3,200 acres of private land between Siena and Volterra, around a fortified core that Belmond dates to 998.

The Bargagli family built the estate into what it is in the nineteenth century, and the castle stayed with noble families through the twentieth. Under the Visconti it became a house for parties, and Luchino Visconti’s guests brought a little film-world glamour to the Sienese hills. Belmond took it over in 2018 and runs it as a hotel of 39 suites and two villas.

Castello di Casole holds two Michelin Keys, renewed in the 2026 selection.

Dinner is at Tosca, in the castle’s stone rooms, with the Castello Grill and the Emporio del Castello for lunch and Bar Visconti for the evening. The Essere Spa sits in a former wine cellar, and the infinity pool looks straight out over the hills. It is the kind of Tuscany that is getting hard to find: a whole village, under one roof line, with nobody else in it.

A wedding here takes the whole hotel, and every rental fee is waived for those days. The flow we would design follows the hotel’s own shape, from the pool on the first evening to the chapel at the end of the last.

The get-together on the first evening, around the infinity pool with the valley below it. Castello di Casole is at its most relaxed here, and the pool bar is already in place.

The open-air square at the centre of the village, seating 120 for the welcome dinner. It is enclosed by the old houses on every side, which is what makes a long table here feel like a village supper rather than a hotel function.

An open-air amphitheatre of stone terraces cut into the hillside below the pool, holding 150, and the ceremony space for a blessing. The guests sit on the slope and look past the couple to the hills, and the view does the work a floral arch would do anywhere else.

The wedding dinner, for up to 150, on a lawn terrace looking down the cypress avenue. A marquee here is compulsory for every event, so the dinner is protected whatever the evening does, and it is the marquee’s size that takes the wedding from 150 towards 180.

The village chapel, seating 40 and taking 80 standing, and the place for the after-dinner party once the marquee is done with. Small and stone-walled, it suits the last hour of the night better than the first.

Tosca’s terrace seats 80 for a lunch or a second dinner across the weekend and takes 120 for drinks, and the Visconti Terrace seats 24, which is the right size for the rehearsal dinner with the families.

A Castello di Casole wedding starts from €800,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €1,200,000 all-in for 120 to 180 guests.

All 41 rooms, sold as one rate and paid in advance by one party: €154,000 to €165,000 a night in June and September, with VAT included. Three consecutive nights is the minimum, so the room side alone is €462,000 to just under €500,000.

The rate is a forfeit rather than a room list, so it cannot be split into individual reservations. Where rooms are already sold on the chosen dates a relocation fee can apply, and on clear dates there is none.

Two of them, charged by the day and payable whether or not they are reached:

• Food and drink: €44,000
• The Essere Spa: just over €6,000, towards treatments

Across a three-night stay the food and drink minimum comes to at least €132,000, and we spend it on occasions rather than leaving it to the bar.

The marquee on the Limonaia Terrace is compulsory and sits outside the hotel’s prices. Above 150 guests the hotel applies an operational fee set against the event, and a set-up that moves the furniture in the common areas can carry a fee of its own.

The buyout has two rules that shape the weekend more than the price does.

The first is the minimum of three consecutive nights. The second is that nobody arrives or leaves on a Saturday, so a Saturday wedding runs Thursday to Sunday or Friday to Monday.

We recommend the Thursday arrival for a Saturday wedding. It gives the welcome dinner its own night in the Courtyard, a free Friday for the spa and the pool, and a Sunday departure that does not have to happen at dawn.

Three nights also means three days of food and drink minimum, which is the argument for designing three real occasions rather than one wedding and two quiet evenings.

Music at Castello di Casole runs until eleven outdoors and until one in the morning indoors, and the buyout is what secures the later hour.

Later hours are possible with the hotel’s approval.

There is one more lever. The Bargagli Suite is a private penthouse on the grounds, not part of the hotel, and reserving it for three to seven nights opens music outdoors after eleven for consideration, held within the local volume limits. For a couple who wants the party under the marquee rather than in the chapel, that is the conversation we open first.

Forty-one rooms, and on a wedding weekend every one of them belongs to the wedding.

The suites run from 61 to 149 square metres for up to four guests and the junior suites from 37 to 66 square metres for up to three, spread between the castle and the stone houses of the village. Many keep the original beams and exposed stone, and several look straight out over the hills.

The two Signature Villas are 250 square metres each and take up to seven guests, which makes them the natural homes for the two families.

The castle is at Querceto, in the comune of Casole d’Elsa, in the province of Siena, eleven minutes from the town itself.

Volterra is 35 minutes and San Gimignano 38. Siena is 48 minutes by road, 36 kilometres, and Florence an hour and ten.

Florence Peretola is an hour and 17 minutes by road and the airport to use for guests coming through London. Pisa is an hour and 53 and Bologna two hours and two.

Rome Fiumicino is three hours and 26, and it carries the year-round direct flights from the United States.

That puts Castello di Casole a little deeper into the countryside than the Chianti estates, and it is the distance that buys the silence. We schedule coaches from Florence for the arrival day and keep the weekend on the estate once everyone is there.

The buyout settles the guests and the hours, and the marquee settles the rest.

The marquee decides the guest count.

The Limonaia Terrace takes 150 under a standard marquee. Going towards 180 depends on a marquee large enough for it and an operational fee, so we size the structure before the invitations go out and price the step from 150 to 180 as its own line.

Eleven outdoors, one indoors.

The music outdoors stops at eleven, and the indoor party runs to one. We design the evening around that hour: dinner under the marquee, then the move indoors to the San Tommaso Chapel for the dancing, with the Bargagli Suite in reserve for a couple who wants the music outside later.

The minimums are the catering budget.

Food and drink are €44,000 a day whatever is eaten, so we spend them on three proper occasions: the Courtyard dinner, the wedding, and a long lunch on Tosca’s terrace on the last day.

The spa allowance is a gift list.

Just over €6,000 a day goes towards treatments at the Essere Spa either way. We turn it into appointments for the wedding party and the parents on the Friday, which is when they need it most.

Magic Day plans weddings at Belmond Castello di Casole for up to 180 guests. The buyout gives a wedding the castle, the village and all 41 rooms for three nights, and it waives the rental of every space. What it does not provide is the wedding: the marquee on the Limonaia Terrace, sized for the guest count, the flowers, the lighting, the musicians held to eleven outdoors and one indoors, the blessing in the amphitheatre, the civil ceremony at the comune of Casole d’Elsa, the coaches from Florence, and the three days of food and drink minimum designed into occasions worth having. Someone who has produced a wedding here knows that the marquee settles the step from 150 to 180, that a Saturday wedding runs Thursday to Sunday, and that the Bargagli Suite is the key to a later night outside.

We have worked Tuscany for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the days come to.