Villa di Geggiano wedding

The Bianchi Bandinelli family has lived at Geggiano since 1527, and still does.

The house began as a 14th-century building and was rebuilt into its present shape in 1786 for a wedding between two noble Sienese families, the Bianchi Bandinelli and the Chigi. The family chapel is older than that rebuilding by eighteen years, and it was also built to celebrate a marriage. Weddings, in other words, are the reason the villa looks the way it does.

Inside, the 18th-century rooms have kept their original decoration: motifs painted by hand to sit alongside wallpapers imported from France, and Toile de Jouy fabrics on the walls. The villa and its gardens are protected as part of Italy’s national heritage, and the estate makes its own organic wine in the Chianti Classico hills around it.

Vittorio Alfieri staged one of his tragedies in the green theatre as a guest of the family, and Bernardo Bertolucci filmed Stealing Beauty here in 1996. Neither is a selling line at Villa Geggiano. Both are simply part of the house.

The whole estate is private for the weekend, and the gardens are where a Villa di Geggiano wedding happens.

Enclosed by old walls and entered under a jasmine arch, this is where we would hold the ceremony and then the cocktail hour, with the rolling hills and the skyline of Siena behind the guests.

An 18th-century garden theatre, raised a little above the lawn and enclosed by tall laurel hedges, and the other ceremony setting. The lawn beside it takes dinner for the full 180, under one or more marquees, and becomes the dance floor afterwards.

The formal garden in front of the villa, with its box hedges and the facade as the backdrop. A long-table dinner here is the version of a Villa di Geggiano wedding we would choose first.

The Ballroom on the first floor seats 60 for dinner, and the reception rooms on the ground floor below take the dancing. They are also the wet-weather plan for the cocktail, whatever the size of the wedding.

Built in 1768 for a family marriage and still in use, the chapel holds 30 for a ceremony.

A Villa di Geggiano wedding starts from €150,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €250,000 all-in for 80 to 120 guests.

At weekends the villa is let whole, for two nights at least, at €5,000 a day. That includes the five suites, the salons, the dining rooms and the gardens, with housekeeping, a house manager and breakfast in one of the historic rooms.

On top of the stay, the event fee is just over €13,000 for up to 100 guests and just under €18,000 for up to 180. So a two-night Villa di Geggiano wedding weekend comes to just over €23,000 for 100 guests and just under €28,000 above that.

A welcome dinner or farewell brunch on the estate is just under €5,000 for up to 100 guests and just over €7,000 for more. Extra days for set-up and breakdown are just over €2,000 each.

Monday to Thursday, the villa hires without the accommodation. That runs from just under €17,000 for up to 100 guests to just under €20,000 for up to 150 and just over €23,000 for up to 180.

Catering is €170 to €270 a head, by menu and by number. Everything else, from the marquee to the last shuttle, comes with suppliers we appoint, and that is where most of the Villa di Geggiano wedding cost sits.

Villa di Geggiano sleeps ten people, and that one fact shapes the weekend.

The couple and their families take the five suites. Everybody else stays at hotels 10 to 15 minutes away, so the guest list becomes a rooming plan across two or three properties before it is anything else. We block those rooms early in a June or September year, because they fill with other people’s weddings.

The house party is small, but with only ten in the house the morning after is quiet, the gardens are empty by one, and the family’s house feels like a house rather than a hotel. We recommend keeping the welcome dinner on the estate for the same reason: it gives the guests from the hotels a first evening at the villa.

Five suites, each with its own bathroom, sleeping ten.

Three suites in the historic main floor of the villa, refurbished in the winter of 2022 and kept as close as possible to the original decoration and wallpapers. Each has its own heating and air conditioning, a walk-in shower and a bath.

A guesthouse in the gardens, renovated in the early 2000s with one of Italy’s leading architects. Two suites, each bathroom with a bath and a separate shower, plus a kitchen, a dining room and a private garden with an open-air jacuzzi. We often suggest it for the family that would like a little distance from the house.

Stays of five nights or more take 20% off the accommodation rate.

Villa di Geggiano stands at Geggiano, in the comune of Castelnuovo Berardenga, six kilometres north-east of Siena on the edge of Chianti Classico.

Siena’s Piazza del Campo is 21 minutes by road and the railway station 15. The town of Castelnuovo Berardenga is 23 minutes away.

Florence Peretola is the nearest airport, an hour and 25 minutes by road, and Florence itself is an hour and 17. Pisa is two hours and 13, Perugia an hour and 42, and Bologna two hours and 12.

Florence and Pisa both have direct flights from London. For guests flying from the US, Rome Fiumicino is three hours and 18 by road and carries the direct routes, and Siena is the place we would base them.

That proximity to Siena is the practical advantage of a Villa di Geggiano wedding in Tuscany. Guests can stay inside the walls of the city, walk the Campo before dinner, and still be at the villa in twenty minutes.

A Villa di Geggiano wedding is a small house with a large garden, and the work is in the gap between the two.

One hundred guests is the line in the fee.

The event fee steps up by just over €4,000 above 100 guests, and the catering and the marquee grow with it. We recommend settling the list on one side of 100 or the other early, because every other number in the budget follows it.

Sixty is the indoor number.

The Ballroom seats 60, so any wedding larger than that has its wet-weather dinner under canvas. We always hold a marquee in the plan for a Villa di Geggiano wedding above 60, even in September, and decide on it with you against the forecast rather than on the day.

The hire ends at midnight.

The day runs from eight in the morning to midnight, with one more hour available for €610. We plan the evening backwards from that: the cake, the first dance and the party all land before midnight, and the shuttles to the hotels are waiting at the gate.

The estate’s own wine belongs on the table.

Villa di Geggiano makes organic wine from its own vines, and we recommend pouring it at dinner. The villa keeps a short list of three recommended caterers, and we brief whichever one you choose for dinner on the lawn.

A day in Siena belongs in the weekend.

With the city twenty minutes away, we build the day before the wedding around it: a walk through the contrade, lunch near the Campo, and a tasting back at the villa in the evening.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa di Geggiano from the first conversation to the final farewell. The villa’s hire covers the house, the gardens, the five suites, a house manager and breakfast. Everything else falls to us: the caterer chosen from the villa’s list and briefed for the lawn, the marquee sized for the guest list and the weather, the lighting for the theatre and the herb garden, the civil ceremony prepared with the registrar, the rooms blocked at hotels around Siena, and the shuttles timed against a midnight finish.

What we know from working this part of Tuscany is that the ten beds and the 60-seat Ballroom set the plan long before the flowers do. We produce Villa di Geggiano weddings from 60 guests in the Ballroom to 180 on the lawns. Tell us your dates and how many people are coming, and we will tell you what the weekend comes to.