Villa Igiea wedding

An English admiral named Domville built a neo-Gothic villa on the rock at Acquasanta at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1899 the Florios bought it, then the richest family in Sicily, and Ignazio and Franca meant to turn it into a sanatorium: their daughter had tuberculosis, and the air on this shore was thought to help.

They changed their minds and commissioned Ernesto Basile instead.

Basile was the architect of Sicilian Liberty, the island’s own Art Nouveau, and between 1899 and 1900 he turned a villa into a hotel, with Ettore De Maria Bergler frescoing the room that now carries his name and Ducrot making the furniture. It opened in 1900 and Basile came back to extend it in 1903.

What followed was the Belle Époque in one building. Edward VII and Queen Alexandra came ashore for lunch in 1907 with the Tsarina; the cast of The Leopard stayed while they shot it; kings of Sweden and Spain signed the book. Then two wars, a requisition, a hospital, the Banco di Sicilia, and a long slow decline under one chain after another.

Rocco Forte bought it at auction in 2018 and reopened it in June 2021, after two years of restoration under Olga Polizzi. The Michelin Guide gives it two Keys.

A wedding here moves between a frescoed hall, a terrace over the water and a garden with a temple in it, and none of it has to be brought in.

The ballroom: 200 seated under the chandeliers, 300 standing, with the marbled columns and the long proportions of a room built for a family that entertained Europe. It is the dinner for a wedding of any size the hotel can hold.

Basile’s own room, frescoed by De Maria Bergler in 1900, with its carved timber ceiling and the gallery above. It seats 80, and in winter it takes the welcome drinks while the gardens wait for spring.

The sea terrace, 400 standing, looking straight out over the gulf to Monte Pellegrino. Aperitivo belongs here and so does the moment the light goes.

A small colonnaded temple stands at the water’s edge below the pool, and the terraced gardens run down to it in steps of bougainvillea and palm. The symbolic ceremony goes in the garden, and the cake is cut at the temple after dark.

The hotel’s restaurant, 80 inside and 70 on the terrace between carved columns, directed by Fulvio Pierangelini, Rocco Forte’s creative director of food. It has no Michelin star of its own, and the cooking is better than that fact suggests.

Where the night ends. The hotel sets up the dancing here with its own bar and runs it to two in the morning, which keeps a party away from the bedrooms.

A hundred rooms and suites, 72 of them rooms and 28 of them suites, across the main villa and the Palazzina Donna Franca, the Liberty pavilion next door that the Florios kept as a private club.

The rooms look either at the gulf or into the gardens, and the restoration kept them Sicilian rather than international: painted headboards, ceramics, striped fabrics, shutters onto the sea.

For a wedding that wants the whole house, a buy-out takes three nights and a minimum spend on food and drink. Short of that, the hotel asks three nights of the wedding’s rooms in the peak months, which is the more common shape: the couple’s guests fill most of the hotel and the rest of the city takes the overflow, ten minutes away.

The hotel stands on its own rock at Acquasanta, on the northern edge of Palermo, with the marina below it and Monte Pellegrino behind.

Palermo Falcone Borsellino is 48 minutes and 34 kilometres along the coast road. The hotel’s brochure says half an hour; we have not seen it done. The airport carries European and UK routes and nothing transatlantic.

Catania is two and three quarter hours away across the island and holds Delta’s non-stop from New York, which is worth the drive for an American guest list of any size.

The historic centre is ten to fifteen minutes by road: the cathedral, the Quattro Canti, the markets at Ballarò and the Capo. Monreale and its mosaics are half an hour up the hill, Mondello twenty minutes round the headland, and the hotel runs a shuttle into town from April to October.

The hotel prices a wedding through its kitchen rather than through a hire fee: the wedding menus start at €240 a head, with VAT and the drinks inside that figure.

• The wedding menus, with the aperitivo, the wine and the cake
• The rooms and terraces themselves, held for the evening
• The setup for a symbolic ceremony, with its own quoted fee
• The after-party on the Tennis Court Terrace, with an open bar by the hour
• A hundred rooms and suites, and a buy-out if the whole house is wanted

The design, the flowers, the lighting, anything built on a terrace, the music, the photography, the transfers, and the legal ceremony, which happens in the city. The room held for the evening, the ceremony setup and the dancing each carry a fee on top of the menus.

A Magic Day wedding at Villa Igiea starts from €150,000 and lands near €250,000.

Take the sea terrace for the aperitivo, not the dinner. The Terrazza Mare is the view everyone books the hotel for, and it is a standing space. We use it for the hour when the light goes and move the dinner inside to the ballroom, which photographs better after dark anyway.

The curfew is a hotel curfew. There are bedrooms over the gardens, so outdoor music comes down early and the hotel sells the late hours on the tennis court instead. We design for that split from the first drawing rather than discovering it in the final week.

Marry in the city first. Palermo will not send a registrar to the hotel, so the legal ceremony happens at the comune or at home. We recommend doing the legal part at home and giving the whole of the day here to the symbolic one.

Book three nights whether or not you buy the house out. In the months worth marrying in, the hotel asks for three nights of the wedding’s rooms, and a wedding that pretends otherwise ends up with half its guests in the city and a coach plan nobody wanted.

Pierangelini’s kitchen is the argument. The food at a Sicilian villa wedding arrives in a van. Here it does not, and a tasting at Florio is the fastest way to decide between this hotel and everything else on the island.

Villa Igiea gives a wedding what almost no Sicilian venue gives: a kitchen that has fed this room for a century, a hundred bedrooms under the same roof, a frescoed hall, a terrace over the sea and a staff who have done it before. A wedding here is bought rather than built, and that changes the whole shape of the budget.

What remains is the part the hotel does not sell. The design and the flowers are yours to bring; the legal marriage happens in the city, because Palermo keeps civil ceremonies in its own rooms; the outdoor music has to yield to the bedrooms above it; and three days of a guest list who have flown to Sicily need Palermo, Monreale and the sea, not three dinners in the same hotel.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa Igiea from the first conversation to the final farewell.