Villa del Balbianello wedding

The villa stands at the tip of the Dosso di Lavedo, a wooded promontory that runs out into the middle of Lake Como from the shore at Lenno. There is no road to it. The land approach is a footpath through the woods from the village, and for a wedding there is no approach at all except by water.

What everybody comes for is the Loggia Durini: three stone arches on the point, smothered in climbing fig, open on both sides to the lake.

The property belongs to FAI, the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, which is the Italian national trust, and it has been a museum since 1988. That ownership explains everything else on this page: the opening hours you work around, the approved suppliers you cannot leave, the municipal paperwork, and the fact that your wedding buys hours rather than a day.

Four spaces, and which ones you get depends entirely on how many hours you buy.

The arches on the point, and where the ceremony goes. A maximum of sixty Chiavarine chairs fit, at €10 plus VAT each, and fewer once there are floral arrangements down the aisle.

Named for the tree. Where the aperitif goes in the three-hour and six-hour formats.

The glasshouse loggia, with arched windows the height of the wall, used for dinner or for dancing. It seats 60 to 70 and that number falls as soon as a DJ booth or a bar goes into it.

Only in the longest format, and only on a Monday or Wednesday. Dinner here requires a platform and a marquee, both mandatory, and it is the only way to seat 130.

A Villa del Balbianello wedding starts from €300,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €500,000 all-in for 60 to 100 guests.

Every figure below is before 22% VAT, and each has two prices: one with the villa open to the public around you, one with it closed from six in the evening.

Two hours, the Loggia Durini for a ceremony and the garden for photographs. Just over €4,000 for ten guests with the museum open, just over €8,000 with it closed. Up to thirty, just over €5,000 and just over €10,000. With the villa closed, fifty guests are just over €10,000, seventy just under €12,000 and a hundred just under €13,000.

Three hours, adding the Loggia Segrè or the camphor area for an aperitif. Thirty guests are just over €6,000 open and just over €11,000 closed, rising to just over €16,000 at a hundred.

Six hours from six in the evening, the ceremony, the aperitif and the Loggia Segrè. Just under €16,000 for thirty, just over €18,000 for fifty, €23,000 for seventy and just under €29,000 for a hundred.

Six hours on a Monday or Wednesday with dinner on the lake terrace, the platform and the marquee mandatory, and dancing in the Loggia Segrè. Up to 130 guests, just over €70,000.

That last line is the page in one number. Going from the six-hour evening format to the one that includes dinner on the terrace multiplies the venue cost by about two and a half, and it also moves the wedding onto a Monday or a Wednesday. Couples who want a hundred and thirty people at dinner on the water are choosing a weekday and a figure several times the one they first saw.

The catering, which comes from FAI’s approved list and is not optional. The marquee, which is strongly recommended below fifty guests and mandatory above them before there can be music at all. The furniture, the flowers, the lighting, the photography, and security staff, which the Tremezzina commune requires for any rental of six hours or more alongside a filed SCIA form.

And the boats, which are not a line couples think to budget.

Before six in the evening, on Mondays and Wednesdays only, €1,000 plus VAT an hour. After midnight, €3,000 plus VAT an hour, available only until two. Extra set-up and dismantling hours are €250 by day and €400 by night.

FAI states it plainly: guest access is by lake only, via taxi boat.

That is the single largest piece of production on a Balbianello wedding and it is the one couples underestimate. A hundred guests do not arrive at once by boat. They arrive in loads, from a jetty with a finite berth, on a lake that has weather, and they leave the same way in the dark. The timetable runs both directions and it has to be built before anything else in the day is fixed.

We schedule it in waves from Lenno with a covered holding point at the departure end, because the one thing that cannot be rescued is a hundred people standing on a quay in the rain.

The reward is the arrival itself, which is the entrance no other venue on this lake can offer and the reason the villa is photographed as often as it is.

There is none at the villa. It is a museum and it has no bedrooms.

Lenno is the nearest village and the natural departure point, with Tremezzo and Bellagio a short distance along and across the water and both holding considerably more rooms. Villa Sola Cabiati and the Grand Hotel Tremezzo are both minutes away by road on the same shore.

We keep the block on the western shore rather than in Bellagio, because every crossing added to the evening is a crossing somebody has to make at one in the morning.

The villa is on the Dosso di Lavedo at Lenno, in the commune of Tremezzina, on the western shore where the lake divides into its two southern legs.

Como is 45 minutes by road and Bellagio is across the water. Milan is an hour and a half.

Milan Malpensa is an hour and 26 minutes to Lenno, Linate an hour and 34 and Bergamo an hour and 51. Lugano, across the Swiss border, is an hour and three. Malpensa is the practical answer for an international guest list and the drive up the western shore is the slow part rather than the flight.

The road from Como to Lenno is a single lane in each direction with stone walls on both sides, and in July and August it does not flow. A coach that takes 45 minutes in May takes well over an hour in August, and there is no alternative route. This is why the boat is not only romantic here.

Buy the hours you actually need, and buy them early.

The rental sheet reads like a menu and it is really a set of four different weddings, from a two-hour ceremony with strangers in the garden to a 130-guest dinner on the water for more than ten times the money. We always price two of them side by side for a couple, because the second figure is the one that decides whether this villa is the venue or the ceremony.

The second thing is the Monday and Wednesday rule, which is the real constraint and not the budget. The villa closes to the public on those two days, which is why the longest format exists then and only then. A couple set on a Saturday at Balbianello is choosing between a Saturday evening after six with dinner somewhere else, or moving the whole wedding to a weekday.

The third is the marquee. Above fifty guests it is mandatory before there can be an after-party with music, it has to be confirmed with the approved supplier and deposited months ahead, and without it the Loggia Segrè will not hold more than sixty or seventy people once a bar and a DJ are in it. It is a five-figure line and it is not a wet-weather option, it is the licence to have a party.

Then there is the water. Every guest, every supplier, every table and every flower arrives by boat, and leaves the same way. It is the most beautiful arrival on Lake Como and it is a logistics operation with a timetable, a weather plan and a cost, and it belongs in the first budget rather than the fourth.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa del Balbianello from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means choosing between the four rental formats and knowing what each one leaves out, the Monday and Wednesday question, the marquee confirmed and deposited in good time, the approved supplier list and what it does to the catering, the SCIA form and the security the commune requires, the civil ceremony with the Tremezzina commune, and the boats in both directions.

We have worked the Italian lakes for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you which of the four formats your guest list has already chosen.