Villa Clara wedding

Villa Clara stands on Via Saverio Mercadante, in the Pinciano quarter, a few streets from the gardens of Villa Borghese.

It was the idea of Adolfo Sebastiani, an engineer, in the 1910s. He began with the architect Oriolo Frezzotti, then turned to Arnoldo Foschini, who redrew the house and finished it in 1929. It is Liberty in its bones and Roman in its details, red brick and carved stone with a loggia tower and a classical Italian garden.

For decades it was the home of a noble Italian family.

Jacques Garcia restored it, lining it in more than a thousand square metres of marble and semiprecious stone, amethyst from Madagascar and the Urals among it, and filling it with a collection that runs from Greek and Roman antiques to Chinese and Japanese pieces. The Heritage Collection, which also lets Château de Villette and Villa Balbiano, lets it today.

A wedding at Villa Clara is a dinner party in a private house, and the house does the decorating.

The top of the villa, with a jacuzzi and a view all the way round Rome over the umbrella pines. It seats 30, the whole wedding, and it is where we put the dinner whenever the evening allows.

Lined in gold and mosaic. It seats 30, so the wedding can move downstairs without losing anybody.

The living rooms on the ground floor, with a working fireplace, a grand piano and the lacquered screens. This is the aperitivo, and the ceremony when it is indoors.

The classical Italian garden and the arched doorway onto the street, where the symbolic ceremony and the photographs happen.

Below ground, a heated indoor pool finished like a Roman bath, with a hammam beside it. Not a wedding space, but the reason the days around the wedding are worth staying in.

A Villa Clara Rome wedding starts from €150,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €250,000 all-in for 20 to 30 guests.

The villa is let whole from €20,000 to €40,000 with VAT, from a single event day to the two-night minimum in its four suites, with some services included, and the event is held inside the stay.

The chef and the drinks, the flowers, the music, the photography, the civil ceremony and the cars. There is no in-house catering, and the villa names its own vendors for some services.

At thirty guests the cost per head is high. What it buys is a house in the middle of Rome that nobody else is in.

Four suites, sleeping eight.

Each was designed separately by Garcia, with marble bathrooms, and one of them is the Japanese Suite. The villa is let whole for at least two nights, so the couple and their parents wake up in the house the wedding is in.

Everyone else stays in Rome’s hotels, and from Pinciano that is easy. Piazza di Spagna is five minutes away, and we block rooms at two or three levels within walking distance of each other.

The villa is at Via Saverio Mercadante 34, in Pinciano, in the second municipio, a few streets north of Villa Borghese.

Piazza di Spagna is five minutes by road, Piazza Venezia six and St Peter’s 13.

Rome Fiumicino is 33 minutes away, with direct flights from the United States and the United Kingdom. Ciampino is 28 minutes and Roma Termini station five.

For a wedding of thirty, cars rather than coaches. We send one to each hotel, and the drive is short enough that nobody notices it.

A house this decorated needs very little from us in the way of design, and a great deal in the way of logistics.

Let the rooms do the work.

Garcia’s interiors are already a set. We prefer to keep the flowers low and the palette inside his, and spend the budget on the chef, the wine and the music instead.

Hold the legal ceremony in the morning.

Rome marries couples in the comune’s own rooms. We book the Sala Rossa at the Campidoglio for the morning, seven minutes away, and bring everybody back to the villa for the ceremony they will remember.

Dinner on the roof, music downstairs.

Pinciano is a residential quarter. Dinner and the speeches go on the terrace, and when the night gets loud it moves inside.

Work with the villa’s vendors.

The villa names its own vendors for some services, and we work alongside them from the first site visit, so the chef and the production team know the house before the wedding week.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa Clara from the first conversation to the final farewell, for twenty guests or for thirty. The villa lets the house, the four suites and some services, and the event sits inside the stay. That leaves the chef, the wine, the flowers, the music, the cars, the civil ceremony at the Campidoglio and the guests’ hotels with the planner.

What we know from working in Rome is the shape of a wedding this size in a city this large: the legal ceremony early at the Campidoglio, lunch somewhere quiet, the symbolic ceremony at the villa in the late afternoon, and dinner on the roof before the music comes inside. We also know which rooms in Pinciano put thirty guests within a walk of each other.

Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the two nights come to.