La Posta Vecchia wedding

Resting on the shore at Palo Laziale, with the sea against its garden wall and the Odescalchi castle of Palo beside it, the villa has been a seaside house for two thousand years.

The Romans were here first. In the second century BC this coast was Alsium, a resort of the emperors, and when J. Paul Getty restored the house in the 1960s his builders found a Roman villa under it: walls, coloured mosaics, African and Greek marble, amphorae.

Getty kept them in the cellar as a private museum, and it is still there.

The house above them was built by the Orsini in the seventeenth century.

Getty filled it with what he and the art historian Federico Zeri collected, and much of it stayed: seventeenth-century tapestries, marble busts of Vespasian and Agrippa, a map by Piranesi in the entrance hall. In 1980 Roberto Sciò bought the villa as his family home, and in 1990 he opened it as a hotel. His daughter Marie-Louise runs it today as Creative Director and CEO of Pellicano Hotels, the group of Il Pellicano at Porto Ercole and Mezzatorre on Ischia.

La Posta Vecchia is a member of The Leading Hotels of the World.

A La Posta Vecchia wedding uses the whole house for two days or more, so the welcome evening, the wedding and the farewell all happen in the same place. The day moves outward from the house to the sea.

The formal garden inside the gates, between the box hedges and the Roman ruins. It holds 160 for a ceremony or the welcome drink, and it is where we put the ceremony when the families want the house behind them.

The terrace facing the sea, seating 140 for dinner and taking 160 for the ceremony or cocktails. This is the room of a La Posta Vecchia wedding, and the one we design every dinner around when the guest count fits it.

The side terrace seats 90. The side garden beyond it is 2,450 square metres of lawn and seats 160, and it is where the marquee goes when the numbers pass what the house holds indoors.

The Camino Room seats 40 for dinner and takes 90 standing. The Getty Studio is the plan B for a ceremony, holding 80. Indoors the house holds 100 at most.

The hotel restaurant, seating 60, which carries the welcome dinner or the farewell lunch on a sea terrace of its own.

A La Posta Vecchia wedding starts from €350,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €450,000 all-in for 80 to 160 guests.

The house is let whole, for two nights at least, from three in the afternoon of the first day to eleven on the last. The hire with its daily food-and-drink minimum comes to just over €150,000 for two nights, VAT included.

All 21 rooms and suites with breakfast, the soft drinks in the minibars, the indoor pool, the private beach, the museum, the gym, the tennis court, the bicycles and the car park. The food-and-drink minimum is set by the day, and it can be spread across the stay as the wedding needs it.

The kitchen is the hotel’s own, under Executive Chef Andrea Barcia, who began his career at Il Pellicano. A four-course dinner starts from €150 a head, with the aperitivo and the open bar alongside it and the wine on consumption.

The marquee above 100 guests, the flowers, the music, the lighting, the photography and the fireworks, and the hotels for everyone the house cannot sleep.

There is no music curfew at La Posta Vecchia while the house is yours.

That is the point of the buyout. With every room taken by the wedding there are no other guests to keep awake, and the hotel sets no restriction on live music for the length of it.

What decides the end of the night is the bar. The open bar is priced to two in the morning and by the hour after that, so we set the hour in the first budget and design the last set around it.

La Posta Vecchia has 21 rooms and suites, sleeping 45, and the wedding takes all of them.

No two are alike. The Getty Suite was Getty’s own room, facing the sea, and the Medici Suite sits in the wing where he lived. Four more named suites, three Tower Suites under the roof, six Superior Rooms facing the sea or the garden, and six Tower Rooms with dormer windows make up the rest.

Forty-five beds is the wedding party and the families, not the guest list. For 120 guests we take the house for the people closest to the couple and put everyone else in Rome, 49 minutes away, or nearer along the coast, with transfers for every event.

The villa stands on the sea at Palo Laziale, in the comune of Ladispoli, on the old Via Aurelia west of Rome.

Piazza Venezia is 49 minutes by road, Saint Peter’s 45 and Roma Termini 51. Cerveteri, with its Etruscan necropolis on the UNESCO list, is 20 minutes away and Castello Odescalchi di Bracciano 39.

Rome Fiumicino is 33 minutes from the villa, with direct flights from the United States and from London. Ciampino, for European flights, is 51 minutes.

Ladispoli-Cerveteri station is 13 minutes away, on the coastal line into Rome. The port of Civitavecchia is 41 minutes north for guests arriving by yacht, and we arrange helicopter transfers from Rome for guests who want one.

The house is the wedding’s for two days, and the second day is worth as much as the first.

Plan the weekend, not the evening.

The buyout is two nights whatever happens, and the food-and-drink minimum can be spread across them. We put a welcome dinner on the terrace the first night and a long lunch by the sea the day after, and the minimum is spent on the weekend rather than lost.

Above 100, the marquee is not optional.

The house holds 100 indoors, and above that number the hotel requires a marquee for the weather. We cost it into the first budget and put it in the side garden, where it leaves the sea terraces clear.

Do the civil ceremony in Ladispoli.

The comune is eleven minutes away. We hold the civil ceremony there with the families the morning before, and the ceremony everyone attends on the terrace the next day.

Children are welcome.

There is no age limit during sole use, which makes this one of the easier houses near Rome for a wedding with young families. The beach and the pool do the rest.

Magic Day plans weddings at La Posta Vecchia from the first conversation to the final farewell, for 40 guests who all sleep in the house or for 160 with a marquee in the garden. The hotel provides the house, its 21 rooms, its kitchen and its staff, and it works with outside suppliers through the couple’s appointed planner.

That leaves the design of two or three days, the marquee above 100, the flowers, the music, the lighting, the civil ceremony in Ladispoli, and the hotels and transfers for every guest the house cannot sleep with the planner. We know how La Posta Vecchia runs: the two-night floor, the food-and-drink minimum spent across the weekend rather than on one night, the indoor limit of 100, and the bar hours set before the evening begins.

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