Villa Cora wedding

The villa stands on the Viale Machiavelli at Arcetri, on the hillside south of the Arno, in a garden that falls away towards the city.

It was built in the 1860s by Baron Oppenheim, and the hotel’s own telling is that it went up as an engagement present. That origin is worth knowing because it explains the building: this is a house designed to be looked at and to look out, with a frescoed ballroom at the centre of it and terraces arranged around the view.

Florence is thirteen minutes down the hill. The dome is visible from the terrace, which is the thing every couple remembers and the thing no amount of money buys at a venue in the countryside.

The wedding uses three rooms inside and two spaces outside, and they work as a sequence through the evening.

The Mirror Room, gilded and chandeliered, seats 100 at round tables. This is the room the wedding is built around and the room the music stops in at ten.

The two salons that open off the ballroom. Taken together with it they carry 150, which is the ceiling of the house.

The long balustraded terrace over the garden, looking north to the city. The aperitivo goes here, and so does the photograph everyone came for.

Formal planting, roses and a pool below the house. On a buyout the pool can hold a party of its own, and authorised fireworks become possible, which they are not otherwise.

A Villa Cora wedding starts from €350,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €550,000 all-in for 70 to 100 guests.

€77,000 per night with VAT included, in June and September, with a minimum of two nights.

That is €154,000 before a single guest has eaten, and it is the number to hold in mind when the per-head figures start to look reasonable. What it buys is the whole property: every room, every salon, the garden, the terrace and the pool, with no other guests in the building.

It also buys latitude. The hotel is explicit that the length of the evening, the music and the use of the pool all loosen once the house is taken whole, and that specific authorised fireworks become possible only in that case.

Quoted separately, against a minimum spend of €30,000 that applies to the wedding day alone rather than across the stay.

The packages start at €264 per person with VAT included. At a hundred guests that is just over €26,000, which sits under the minimum, so the minimum is the number that governs and the menu rises to meet it rather than the other way round.

A buyout carries a further minimum of €3,000 on spa services. It is small against the rest and it is easy to miss in a first reading of the terms.

Flowers, decoration, music, photography, the cake, and anything hired in beyond the linen, the mise en place and the gold Chiavarine chairs the hotel provides. The city tax is extra.

Villa Cora has an in-house kitchen and would rather you used it, but outside catering is permitted once the house is taken whole.

The €30,000 minimum on the hotel’s own food and drink is owed either way, which makes an external caterer a decision about the menu rather than about the money. There are no mandatory vendors of any kind. The single exception is the DJ, who is approved by the hotel before the date is confirmed.

That is an unusually open position for a Florence hotel of this size, and it is worth saying plainly.

Music in the Mirror Room runs until ten o’clock.

At Il Pasha, the bar the party moves to afterwards, it runs until midnight.

Read quickly that looks like a two-hour extension. Read properly it is the central constraint of the venue: the gilded room that the entire wedding is designed around is the room that closes first, and the last two hours happen somewhere smaller and darker.

The hotel’s own qualification matters here. It says the timings and the kind of act it accepts both become flexible when the villa is bought out, and a wedding at Villa Cora is a buyout by definition. So the hours are negotiable in practice. They are negotiated, not assumed, and we get the finishing time and the permitted acts written into the contract before anything is signed.

Forty-one rooms and suites, sleeping 90 to 100.

They are spread between the main villa and the Villino, and the decoration runs from frescoed nineteenth-century ceilings to the deep reds and purples the hotel is known for. Every one was restored with the original architectural detail kept.

The number that matters is the relationship between 41 rooms and 100 seats. Most Florence venues of this quality seat far more people than they sleep, and the guest list scatters across the city at the end of the night. Here it does not.

The villa is on the Viale Machiavelli in the Oltrarno, on the hill below Piazzale Michelangelo.

Florence city centre is thirteen minutes by car, which is the whole argument for the place. Guests can walk the Uffizi in the morning and be back for the aperitivo.

Florence Peretola is seventeen minutes by road. Bologna is an hour and sixteen minutes and Pisa an hour and 26, and both are worth putting on the invitation for guests connecting from outside Europe, because Florence is a small airport with a short runway and a habit of diverting.

Siena is an hour and seven minutes. Rome Fiumicino is three and a half hours and nobody should be asked to do it.

The whole house, the real total and the hour the music stops are the three things to settle here, and only one of them is on the first page of the quote.

Music in the Mirror Room stops at ten.

The party moves to Il Pasha afterwards and runs there until midnight. That is the real shape of an evening here, and it is the one fact about this venue worth knowing before any other. On a buyout the hotel extends both the hour and the kind of act it will accept, and we fix the finishing time, the permitted acts and the move downstairs in the contract at the point the deposit is paid.

The three minimums are one number and it is not €77,000.

The hire is €154,000 for the two nights, the food and drink minimum is €30,000 on the day, and the spa minimum is €3,000. That is €187,000 before flowers, music, photography or a single bed being slept in, and it is why the honest starting figure for this house is €350,000 rather than the number on the first line of the quote.

Use the buyout for what it actually unlocks.

Most couples read the buyout as privacy and stop there. It is also the only route to the pool party, to fireworks, to an external caterer and to a longer evening, and all four of those are listed in the hotel’s own terms as conditional on it. We design the weekend around those permissions rather than treating them as extras, because they are already paid for.

Put the legal ceremony in the same day.

The villa cannot marry you legally and the comune is thirteen minutes away. That is close enough to do the civil ceremony in the morning and the symbolic one here in the afternoon without the day feeling like two events, which is not true of a venue an hour out in Chianti. We schedule it tight and keep the cars waiting.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa Cora from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the two nights and the whole house, the three minimums costed as one number, the music hours argued and written down, the civil ceremony booked at the comune and timed against the symbolic one, the DJ put through the hotel’s approval, the caterer chosen on the menu rather than the money, and the pool and the fireworks used because the buyout has already bought them.

We have worked Florence and Tuscany for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the two nights come to.