Commenda di San Calogero wedding

A commenda was an estate granted to a knight of a military order, who farmed it and sent the order its share. This one was founded by Riccardo Passeneto, a Norman nobleman, under the order of Santiago, and it has been worked ever since.

The ground is older than the order. There are tombs on the estate from the ninth and tenth centuries before Christ, and a cave that was a place of worship in the Byzantine centuries, where the saint the place is named for is said to have sheltered on his way to Sciacca. A castle stood here too, drawn by Camilliani in the sixteenth century and gone now.

The earthquake of 1693 took most of the rest.

What was rebuilt on the ruins of the fourteenth-century abbey is the masseria standing today, extended in the early nineteenth century and kept as a hunting reserve until the 1970s. It passed through the Gaetani, princes of Cassaro, to the Matarazzo family, who own it still and keep one of the oldest horse farms in Sicily on it, along with the wheat, the olives and the oranges.

Twelve distinct areas and three separate entrances, which is why a wedding here can be three different evenings without anybody seeing the next one being built.

The great court, twenty-one metres by twenty-three, walled on all sides by the old buildings. It takes the dinner for a large wedding and holds the light long after the fields have gone dark.

A thousand square metres of grass, with two smaller gardens either side of it, one facing the sea and one facing Etna. This is where the marquee goes when a wedding is large enough to need one.

Forty metres by eighteen, under gazebos, which is the estate’s answer to the middle of the afternoon: shade, a breeze and somewhere to put four hundred people with a drink.

Consecrated, and about forty seats. It cannot hold the religious wedding itself, only the blessing of one already celebrated, and it is the loveliest small room on the estate.

The field is cut for the ceremony and the little wood behind it takes the aperitivo. Both are photographs more than they are rooms, and they are why couples come here rather than to a hotel.

Inside, the rooms seat 250 between them, with the arcaded space under the old manger as the overflow. That number is the wet-weather plan and it is a good one by Sicilian standards.

Forty-five guests sleep on the estate: twelve rooms in the villa itself, and, about eight hundred metres off, Casa Zigolo and three apartments.

The rooms are the family’s: lime-washed in coral and ochre and powder blue, with cane-and-beam ceilings, iron bedsteads and doors that open straight onto a courtyard. There is a spa in a brick-vaulted chamber with an oculus in the roof.

No minimum stay applies on a date given to an event, which is rare and useful: a wedding can take the rooms for one night or a week without the estate insisting on the difference. Everyone above 45 stays in Siracusa or Catania, both 40 minutes away, and comes by coach.

The estate is in Contrada San Calogero, in the comune of Augusta, in the province of Siracusa, on the low ground between Catania and Siracusa with the sea a few kilometres east.

Catania is 40 minutes by road. It carries Delta’s non-stop from New York from mid-April into October, the only transatlantic flight into southern Italy, which makes this part of Sicily a one-leg journey for an American guest list.

The brochure says twenty minutes to the airport. The road, routed, does not do it in twenty, and the last kilometre and a half is farm track.

Siracusa is 40 minutes and Ortigia 43. Catania is the same in the other direction, Brucoli and its fjord-like inlet are ten minutes away, and Etna stands on the skyline from the garden that faces it.

The estate is hired by the day, and the rate moves with the season and with the day of the week: €15,000 with VAT for a Saturday in June, July or August, and a fraction of that from Sunday to Thursday in winter. A wedding over three days is those three days added together.

• The whole property for the event, with twelve areas and three entrances, less the pool and the ground in front of the private wing
• Twelve double rooms with breakfast, for up to 24 guests, inside the daily rate
• Candles from the car park to the entrance arch and along the garden paths, and fairy lights in the stable area
• Parking for more than two hundred cars, with staff on it, and a manager who handles the suppliers on the day
• The chapel, and the paperwork for a civil ceremony with the comune

Everything else, and the estate is clear about it: it does not plan weddings or coordinate suppliers, beyond the manager who deals with them on the day. An outside caterer brings its own furniture and its own kitchen; the design, the flowers, the lighting, the sound, the music, the photography and the coaches all come in; and every hour past two in the morning is charged.

A Magic Day wedding at Commenda di San Calogero starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000.

The rate is a day, not a wedding. Three days are three days added together, and each carries its own season and its own weekday price, so moving the welcome dinner from a Friday to a Thursday saves more than most couples expect. We price the shape of the weekend before we design it.

The size of this place is the point. A hundred hectares and three entrances means the welcome dinner, the wedding and the farewell brunch can each have their own ground, and the build for one never shows at the other. Few Sicilian venues can do that, and we design around it.

Use the in-house kitchen unless there is a reason not to. The furniture comes with those menus. Bringing a caterer means bringing tables, chairs, glass and a kitchen too, and the saving evaporates.

There is no curfew and there are decibel limits. Those are different things. The estate will sell you the hours past two, but the law still caps the volume, so we set the sound design and the speaker positions early rather than turning everything down at midnight.

Plan the heat, not the date. This is the Sicilian interior in summer: the ceremony belongs at six or later, the aperitivo belongs under the gazebos, and a July wedding that starts at four will be remembered for the wrong reason.

Commenda di San Calogero gives a wedding a hundred hectares, twelve areas, a chapel, a kitchen if it is wanted, forty-five beds and a comune that will register the marriage on the grounds. It is one of the few places in Sicily with no ceiling outdoors and a real room for 250 indoors, which means a wedding of any size can be planned here without a compromise written into it on the first day.

It also says plainly that it does not plan weddings, and its own manager handles the suppliers on the day rather than the year before it. So the choosing between twelve areas, the building of each one, the caterer’s kitchen, the coaches from Siracusa and Catania, the hours bought past two and the sound kept inside the law are all somebody else’s job.

Magic Day plans weddings at Commenda di San Calogero from the first conversation to the final farewell.