Villa Cetinale wedding

The villa stands in the hills west of Siena, in the comune of Sovicille, at the end of a cypress avenue with wooded ridges on three sides.

It was built in the 1680s for Cardinal Flavio Chigi, nephew of Pope Alexander VII, and the architect was Carlo Fontana. What makes it unusual is not the house but what was laid out around it: a formal garden, a long avenue, and behind it a sacred wood with a staircase of three hundred steps climbing the ridge to a hermitage at the top.

In 2024 Millie Bobby Brown and Jake Bongiovi celebrated their wedding here with family and friends, a few months after a small legal ceremony in the United States.

It is still a private house. It is let whole, by the week, and it comes with its own chefs, waiters, housekeepers and porters rather than a front desk.

The wedding happens outdoors, and the house is where the party sleeps and shelters.

The parterre in front of the villa, with its statuary and clipped box. The ceremony and the dinner both go here, and the outdoor ceiling is a hundred.

The lemon house, holding about 80. This is the wet-weather answer and it is the reason the guest number matters so much.

The cypress avenue running away from the house, and the holy staircase climbing the wooded ridge behind it to the Romitorio. Neither seats anybody. Both are why people come.

Below the garden, with the Sienese hills beyond. The aperitivo and the morning after both happen here.

A Villa Cetinale wedding starts from €200,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €300,000 all-in for 60 to 100 guests.

Cetinale lets Friday to Friday. Between November and April a four-night stay is possible; from May to October it is a week or nothing.

The 2027 rate runs from €27,000 a week in the depth of winter to €62,000 between late June and late August. May sits at €45,000, late June to late August at the top, and the weeks from late August to the start of October at €55,000.

That rate includes the daily staff: the chef, the waiters, the housekeepers and the porters. It does not include a single thing anyone eats.

Charged on top, by the number of people attending: €3,000 up to 25 guests, just under €8,000 to a maximum of 75, and just under €11,000 from 76 to 100.

€160 per adult per day, which the estate breaks into €35 for breakfast, €50 for lunch and €75 for dinner. Breakfast is compulsory for everyone staying in the villa. Drinks are charged on consumption and cover wine, spirits, water and coffee.

Three more on the estate, each let by the week alongside the villa: Cerbaia for 13 with its own pool and garden, Casa Fabbri for six and Casa Stella for four. Together they add 23 beds.

This is the line that separates a house party at Cetinale from a wedding there, and it is easy to read past.

The villa’s own kitchen caters for 25 people. Above that number the estate requires an outside caterer, which means a second supplier, a second contract, a kitchen tent and a set of logistics that the weekly rate does not touch.

So a wedding of 90 at Cetinale is a bare-hire wedding with a staffed house attached. The staff cook for the family across the week and somebody else cooks the wedding dinner. Both things are true at once and the budget has to hold both.

The garden takes a hundred.

The interior takes 26.

That is not a detail, it is the shape of the whole decision. The limonaia holds about 80 in bad weather, so up to 80 guests there is a roof to move under, and between 80 and 100 there is not one unless a marquee has been hired from the beginning.

The estate suggests a marquee for exactly this reason, and we would rather cost one into the first budget than hold a hundred people’s wedding against the forecast. In May and September the Sienese hills are kind more often than not. They are not reliable, and we want the marquee standing in the garden before the forecast is even read.

Music is permitted at the villa within the local rules and stops at one in the morning.

For a private house with no hotel neighbours and woods on three sides, one is a reasonable hour and later than most of the Chianti allows outdoors. It also sits inside a week-long let rather than a single night, which changes how an evening is planned: there is no rush to compress everything into one celebration when the party has the house until Friday.

Twenty-five in the villa, and 23 more across the estate.

The villa holds nine double bedrooms, three twins and one single. The rate takes all of them for the week whether or not every bed is used, and the staff come with it.

Cerbaia, a few minutes away, has five doubles, a twin and an extra double reached through the laundry, for 13, with an equipped pool and a garden for dining outside. Casa Fabbri takes six and Casa Stella four, both with their own pools or terraces.

Forty-eight beds in all against a hundred seats. The rest of the guest list goes to Siena, which is half an hour away and has rooms worth putting people in.

The villa is on the Strada di Cetinale at Sovicille, in the province of Siena, west of the city towards the Montagnola hills.

Siena is 30 minutes and the Val di Merse begins just south.

Florence Peretola is an hour and 32 minutes by road and Florence city centre an hour and 27. Pisa is two hours and 16, Perugia an hour and 59 and Rome Fiumicino three and a half hours.

Half an hour from Siena is the number that matters for a week-long wedding. Guests staying in the city can come and go across the whole week rather than appearing once for the dinner.

The week is the product, and most couples price the night.

Cetinale is let Friday to Friday.

Cetinale is let Friday to Friday from May to October, so a couple is buying seven days whether they plan them or not. We design the week, the arrival dinner, the day in Siena, the wedding and the recovery lunch at Cerbaia, because the alternative is paying for six days nobody used.

The house chef stops at 25.

The house chef stops at 25 and a wedding of 90 needs an outside kitchen. That decision shapes the budget more than the rate does, and it has to be made early because the good caterers in the Sienese hills are booked a year out.

Eighty, or a structure.

The limonaia takes about 80 and the garden a hundred. Between those two figures there is no rain plan, only a structure. We would rather fix that in the first budget than argue about the forecast in the week of the wedding.

The hermitage holds no wedding.

The Scala Santa and the Romitorio at the top are the images everyone comes for, and neither holds a wedding. We put the ceremony in the garden where the hundred chairs fit and take the couple up the staircase afterwards.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa Cetinale from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the week designed rather than the day, the outside caterer appointed early because the house chef stops at 25, the guest number held against the limonaia or the marquee costed from the start, the event fee band understood before the list is drawn, the three estate houses allocated to the people who most need them, rooms blocked in Siena for everyone else, and the ceremony placed where a hundred chairs actually fit.

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 week comes to.