Borgo Pignano wedding

The estate sits on a hilltop in the comune of Volterra, with 740 acres of farmland and forest around it and two nature reserves beyond that.

At the centre is an eighteenth-century villa, and around it a hamlet that goes back to the twelfth century: the church of San Bartolomeo, La Canonica beside it where the priest once lived, farm buildings turned into maisonettes, and nine villas scattered down the slopes with pools of their own. Streams and lakes water the fields, the kitchen garden, the orchards and the vineyard.

The estate grows ancient grains for its own bread and pasta, presses its own oil and makes its own red, white, rosé and sparkling wine.

Borgo Pignano has been a member of Relais & Châteaux since 2025. Its restaurant, Villa Pignano, holds a MICHELIN Green Star for cooking from the estate’s own land, under chef Angelantonio Cioffi.

The estate is taken whole, and a Borgo Pignano wedding is held entirely outdoors, moving from the forest or the church to the terrace and then the courtyard.

A clearing in the woods for the ceremony. We send couples here who want a ceremony that looks like nowhere else in Tuscany.

The church on the estate and the courtyard in front of it, the more traditional of the two ceremony spaces.

Where the wedding dinner goes, looking out across the farmland towards the hills. Whenever the weather allows, this is where we seat the dinner.

The after-party, with music until two in the morning.

Every event at Borgo Pignano is held outdoors, and the weather backup is a marquee.

So the marquee goes into the plan from the first budget. We site and size it with the estate, and release it only if the forecast allows.

A Borgo Pignano wedding starts from €450,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €650,000 all-in for 100 to 150 guests.

The estate is priced by the month, from €50,000 to €95,000 a night. One night is the minimum in March, April and November. From May to October it is two.

All the food and drink comes from the estate’s kitchen and cellar, and the minimum spend is €35,000 for each night of the stay. Corkage is not permitted.

The Borgo Pignano wedding cost per head starts from €190 for the wedding dinner. A welcome dinner runs from €110 a head for the pizza party to €165 for the seafood grill, the aperitif from €90 and the dessert buffet from €35. The open bar is €70 a head for the first hour and €50 for each one after, or €80 and €55 for the premium list, with two hours the minimum on the wedding day.

Every room and villa on the estate, and the tables, chairs, cutlery, plates and glassware for the events. A €15,000 damage deposit is taken on arrival and returned after the event.

The marquee, the flowers, the music, the lighting, the photographer and the transfers.

Music plays until two in the morning in the Inner Courtyard.

That is where the after-party goes, and it is the only curfew at Borgo Pignano. The event itself is priced on six hours, and the hours beyond it are bought by the hour, with every hour after midnight charged whatever the length of the evening.

So a wedding that starts at six and dances until two has bought every hour after midnight. We cost the evening forward from the ceremony rather than backwards from a six-hour window, and buy the hours before the night.

Borgo Pignano accommodation runs to 64 bedrooms in 33 units, sleeping 128 guests, with sofa beds and roll-away beds for children under twelve.

Twelve rooms and suites sit in the eighteenth-century villa, with views over the olive groves and the vineyard, and the Sant’Antonio suite stands in the medieval hamlet. La Canonica, the old priest’s house beside the church, has three bedrooms under vaulted ceilings and frescoes. Ten more maisonettes sit in the gardens a few steps from the infinity pool.

Nine private villas, each with its own pool, are spread across the estate, from two bedrooms to six. They go to the families.

A hundred and twenty-eight in standard bedding against 150 at dinner puts almost the whole wedding to bed on the estate, but not quite all of it. Above 128 we take rooms in Volterra and run the cars back at two.

The estate is at Pignano in the comune of Volterra, in the province of Pisa, on the hills between Volterra and San Gimignano.

Volterra is 30 minutes away, San Gimignano 38 and Siena an hour and seven.

Florence Peretola is an hour and 33 minutes away and Pisa an hour and 43. That near parity is unusual and useful: this is the western side of Tuscany, and Pisa carries flights that Florence does not.

Bologna is two hours and 23 and Rome Fiumicino four hours and 13.

The month is the lever on the largest number in the budget, and the estate has more to fill than a single dinner.

May and October price below June.

The estate prices May and October well below the height of summer, for months that in the Volterra hills are often kinder than July. Both carry the two-night minimum, and we prefer them for a dinner on the Belvedere Terrace.

Four events, not one.

The estate suggests a welcome dinner, a pre-ceremony aperitif, the wedding dinner and either a party or a farewell brunch. With 128 people asleep on the property and a food-and-drink minimum on every night, a couple who plans only the Saturday has bought a great deal of estate and used it once.

The days around the wedding are already here.

Truffle-hunting, wine-tasting, cooking, riding and the spa fill the welcome day without a coach leaving the estate. There is a children’s programme and a play area, and a children’s menu up to eleven.

Pisa belongs on the invitation beside Florence.

An hour and 43 against an hour and 33 is close enough that guests should pick on the flight rather than the drive. We book cars from whichever they choose.

Magic Day plans weddings at Borgo Pignano from the first conversation to the final farewell, for 100 guests or for 150. The estate hosts: the villa, the hamlet and the villas for one night or two, a kitchen that cooks every meal, and the tables and chairs. Everything else falls to the planner: the marquee for an estate where every event is outdoors, the flowers, the music, the lighting, the civil ceremony at Volterra and the cars from Florence and Pisa.

What we know from working the estate is where the money goes. The month sets the hire, the food-and-drink minimum runs on every night, and the hours past the sixth are counted from the ceremony, not from dinner. We also know the 33 units by size, so families take a villa between them and the villa rooms go to the couple’s own people.

Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the stay comes to.