Lupaia wedding

The hotel sits on a ridge above Montefollonico in the comune of Torrita di Siena, looking across the Val di Chiana towards Montepulciano.

It was a farm, built in the seventeenth century and marked 1622 on an arch in the courtyard, and it had fallen derelict before the current owners spent years putting it back with the materials that were already there. What they produced is twelve rooms, a restaurant, a bar, a library, a wine room, an infinity pool and a heated jacuzzi, arranged around courtyards and a lawn, with a team of 35 looking after at most 24 people.

The hotel holds one Michelin Key.

The property is small and the wedding uses all of it, which is the point rather than a limitation.

A long vine-covered pergola with a curved banquette beneath it, and the courtyard it opens onto. Dinner for 36 goes here when the evening is warm.

The vaulted room beside the kitchen, with its open fire and its coloured glass lanterns. This is the wet-weather answer and it is a good one.

The infinity pool at the edge of the ridge with the lawn above it, used for the ceremony and for the hours before dinner.

Two small rooms for the smaller moments of the weekend: a tasting, a quiet hour, the speeches when the party has pulled inside.

A Lupaia wedding starts from €150,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €250,000 all-in for up to 36 guests.

€24,000 a night for 24 guests in double occupancy, with three consecutive nights the minimum. That is €72,000 before anything else.

The rate is unusually complete. It includes breakfast, the minibar, the parking and every tax and service charge, so the number on the quote is the number on the invoice, which is rarer in Tuscany than it should be.

A minimum of €5,000 a day, and the reply is specific that it is not cumulative. Each day stands on its own, so an under-spend on the Friday cannot be carried into the Saturday.

Across three days that is €15,000, which for 36 guests eating three times a day is a floor most weddings pass without trying.

Everything else. The ceremony, decoration, music, flowers and hair are all brought in, and the hotel is clear that it expects a planner to handle them.

Hire and food together are €87,000 for three nights. The gap between that and €150,000 is what a wedding of this kind actually costs in flowers, music, photography, hair, transport and the rest, and at 36 guests it buys a great deal per person.

The hotel’s wording leaves no room: 36 is the maximum capacity in any location available for those functions at Lupaia.

That covers the symbolic ceremony and every food and beverage function, including the cocktails, the lunches, the dinners and the wedding dinner itself, indoors and outdoors alike. It is not a preference about numbers and it is not a fire regulation that a marquee solves. There is nowhere on the property that holds more.

Couples arrive at Lupaia having fallen for the photographs and then discover the ceiling, and it is better discovered now. We would not take a brief for 60 people here, and we would not try to persuade the hotel.

What the number buys is the inverse of the usual compromise. A wedding of 36 on a property staffed for 24 is one of the highest ratios of attention to guest we work with anywhere, and the evening is unhurried in a way that a hundred-guest wedding cannot be.

There is no curfew at Lupaia, of any kind.

The reason is worth understanding because it is structural rather than generous. The hotel accepts wedding celebrations only when the entire property is booked, and it says in its own terms that this is exactly why there are no issues with noise or a night curfew. Everyone on the hill is at the wedding, so there is nobody to disturb and nobody to complain.

That makes Lupaia one of a small number of Tuscan venues where the end of the night is decided by the couple and the band rather than by an ordinance or a staffing rate.

Twelve rooms and suites, sleeping 24 in double occupancy.

They are spread through the restored farm buildings around the courtyards, each one different, furnished with antiques and the original stone and beams left where they were. The rate takes all twelve whether or not they are all used.

Twenty-four beds against 36 guests leaves twelve people sleeping off the property. Montefollonico is a few minutes away and Montepulciano about twenty, and both have rooms worth putting guests in rather than apologising for.

The hotel is at Località Lupaia near Montefollonico, in the comune of Torrita di Siena, between the Val di Chiana and the Val d’Orcia.

Montepulciano is twenty minutes, Pienza half an hour and Siena an hour and 36.

Florence Peretola is two hours and twelve minutes by road and Perugia an hour and 55. Rome Fiumicino is three hours and 28 and Pisa three hours and thirteen.

This is a long way from an airport by any measure, and for 36 people that is a manageable amount of driving rather than a logistical problem. We book cars and let guests arrive without a map.

The ceiling is the brief, and everything else follows from it.

Thirty-six is the brief, not a starting point.

It is absolute, and no structure, marquee or overflow changes it. Couples who want a hundred guests somewhere this beautiful are better served elsewhere, and we say so in the first conversation rather than hoping the list shrinks.

Spend what the small number frees.

A budget of €250,000 across 36 guests is roughly seven thousand euros a head, which is several times what the same money does at 150 guests. We put that into the things people stand closest to: the flowers on the table they are sitting at, the musicians they can hear properly, and food that can be cooked to order because there are only three dozen plates.

Use the lack of a curfew properly.

No hour and no volume limit is rare in Tuscany and it is the strongest thing this hotel sells. We design the evening to run long rather than to peak early, because there is no deadline to work back from and no staff rate ticking after midnight.

Plan the twelve beds that are not here.

Twenty-four sleep on site and 36 attend, so a dozen guests are in Montefollonico or Montepulciano. We allocate those rooms ourselves rather than leaving guests to book, and we run cars at the end of the night so that nobody is the person who had to drive.

Magic Day plans weddings at Lupaia from the first conversation to the final farewell. The hotel requires a planner and hands over every external service, so that means the three nights and the whole property, the guest list held at 36 from the start, the symbolic ceremony on the lawn and the legal one at a comune nearby, the daily food and drink minimum designed into three real meals, the flowers, music and hair brought in and coordinated, the rooms in Montefollonico allocated for the dozen who do not sleep here, and an evening built to run as long as you want it to.

We have worked Tuscany for years. Tell us the dates you are considering, and we will tell you what the three nights come to.