Borgo San Felice wedding

San Felice is a village rather than a house, and that is the thing to understand before anything else.

It stands in the Chianti Classico vineyards south-east of Siena, in the comune of Castelnuovo Berardenga, and its origins are medieval. What the resort did was restore the whole hamlet rather than convert one building, so the lanes, the piazza, the Romanesque church and the stone houses are all still there and the 62 rooms are distributed through them.

The resort holds two Michelin Keys. It is also a working wine estate, and the cellars under the village are part of the tour rather than a decoration.

A wedding takes the village, and the day moves through it on foot.

The square at the centre of the hamlet, with the church on one side. This is where the aperitivo goes and where the dancing usually ends up.

Romanesque, small and in the middle of everything. A Catholic ceremony here needs no transport at all, which is rarer than it sounds.

Immersed in the trees below the village, used for a symbolic ceremony when the church is not the plan.

Where the sunset hour happens, looking out over the Chianti hills towards Siena.

A Borgo San Felice wedding starts from €350,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €550,000 all-in for 90 to 135 guests.

€98,000 a night, with a minimum of two nights. The figure includes buffet breakfast for every guest and VAT is already inside it.

There is no seasonal band and no second rate card. A night in May costs what a night in October costs, which is unusual in Tuscany and makes this one of the easier budgets to hold still.

What it buys is sole use of the entire hamlet: every room, every lane, the piazza, the church, the pool, the terraces and the restaurants, with no other guests anywhere in the village.

A wedding of 80 guests or more requires the full buyout. Below 80, a partial booking of rooms and the wedding spaces can be arranged instead.

Most weddings at San Felice sit well above that line, so for practical purposes the €98,000 is the price of the place.

All of it is the resort’s own, cooked in its kitchens, and quoted separately against the brief. There is no outside caterer.

The city tax at €5 a head per night, flowers, music, photography, the cake and anything hired in.

The difference between San Felice and a great Tuscan villa is not size.

It is that a village has streets.

A wedding in a villa happens in rooms and on terraces, and the guests move between them as a group. A wedding in a borgo happens along lanes, and people drift: there is a bar in one corner, a terrace in another, the church in the middle and sixty-two front doors in between. Guests find each other rather than being arranged.

That shape suits a wedding of 120 better than it suits one of 40, because it needs enough people to fill the streets. We always push this venue towards the top of its range rather than the bottom.

It is also the trade-off to weigh. A smaller wedding cannot make this hamlet feel smaller, because the rate is the rate and the lanes are the length they are, so sixty guests pay for a village they are too few to fill.

The resort’s position is that the party runs with music until late, and that how late depends on whether the booking is a full buyout.

That points one way. On a buyout there is no other guest in the hamlet whose night is being spoiled, so the usual reason a hotel stops a band at midnight does not apply here at all.

We settle the finishing hour with the resort for the date and write it into the contract before signature, along with the SIAE licence. A band is booked against an hour, so the hour is fixed first.

Sixty-two rooms and suites, sleeping up to 135, distributed through the restored houses of the hamlet.

They run from Premium Deluxe rooms through Prestige rooms and Suites to a handful of named suites: Loggia, Legnaia, Pieve, L’Uliveta and Le Erbe. All of them are inside the nightly rate along with breakfast, so there is no saving in using fewer and nobody has to be told they are sleeping somewhere else.

Villa Casanova can be added to the booking when the guest list runs past the village.

The hamlet is at San Felice near Villa a Sesta, in the comune of Castelnuovo Berardenga, in the province of Siena.

Siena is 29 minutes away and Florence city centre an hour and sixteen, which puts the whole of the Chianti within an easy morning.

Florence Peretola is an hour and 27 minutes by road. Pisa is two hours and 18, Perugia an hour and 39, Bologna two hours and fourteen and Rome Fiumicino three hours and 14.

Half an hour from Siena matters more than the airport number. It means the rehearsal dinner or the day before can happen in the city without the weekend turning into a series of expeditions.

The rate does not move, which changes how the calendar is chosen.

Choose the date on weather and availability, not on price.

€98,000 a night is the figure in May and the figure in October, so there is no saving to chase and no shoulder season to be talked into. We pick the week that gives the strongest chance of an evening outdoors and then move quickly, because 62 rooms in the Chianti go a long way ahead.

Fill the village.

A borgo needs people in its streets to work, and at 60 guests the lanes feel empty while the rate stays the same. We would rather plan this venue at 120 than at 80, because the price per head falls as the place comes alive, and both of those move in the same direction.

Use the church.

It stands in the main piazza, which means the ceremony, the aperitivo and the dinner all happen within a hundred metres of each other and no guest is ever in a car. That is the single biggest difference between a wedding here and a wedding at an estate where the church is in the next village.

The finishing hour comes with the buyout.

The resort’s position is that the party runs late once the whole hamlet has been taken, and on a full buyout every person inside the walls is at the wedding. We fix it as an hour in the contract before the band is booked.

Magic Day plans weddings at Borgo San Felice from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the two nights and the whole hamlet, the guest list built to fill the streets rather than to meet a minimum, the church in the piazza used for the ceremony and the legal half arranged at the comune, the resort’s own kitchens briefed properly because there is no alternative, the finishing hour agreed in writing, and the rehearsal dinner taken into Siena half an hour away.

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 two nights come to.