Villa Mangiacane wedding

Mangiacane is a Renaissance villa at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, in the Chianti hills a short drive south of Florence.

The house was built by the Machiavelli family, and the main building still carries the name Palazzo Machiavelli. Its loggia looks north across the olive groves to the Duomo, which is the view the villa was designed around. Inside there are frescoed rooms, lounges, a historic dining room and a spa with an indoor pool; outside there are formal gardens, olive terraces, a courtyard and a second villa with its own pool and rose garden.

The estate’s own art collection runs through the public rooms.

Eight spaces are published with their own capacities, and a wedding of any size uses several of them in sequence.

The largest space on the estate: 250 guests, or 200 seated for a ceremony, among the olive terraces.

Two hundred people indoors, and the room the party moves into when the outdoor curfew lands at ten.

A hundred and fifty on round tables, enclosed by the house, which is the dinner setting most couples choose.

A hundred each: the formal garden for dinner outdoors, and the old barrel room for dinner under vaults.

Seventy apiece, upper and lower, with the view back to Florence from both.

A Villa Mangiacane wedding starts from €300,000, and for optimal results we recommend budgeting €450,000 all-in for 150 to 250 guests.

Twenty-eight rooms for up to 60 guests, three nights minimum, VAT included:

• Mid-May to mid-October: just under €34,000 a night
• Mid-October to mid-May: just over €29,000 a night

Three nights at the season rate puts the accommodation floor just over €101,000.

Palazzo Machiavelli can be taken on its own for up to 22 guests: just over €19,000 a night in season and just over €14,000 outside it. That includes the spa, the indoor pool, the historic dining room and the loggia, and for a wedding of 150 guests where only the families stay over it is the cheaper route by a wide margin.

Breakfast is just under €40 a head a day, an extra bed €165 a night, and a night concierge from five in the evening to nine in the morning €660. Heating the indoor pool is €440 a day. Utilities above 1,000 kilowatts a week are charged on top, and the city tax is €2 a head a night.

Catering, flowers, lighting, the band, the entertainment tax, and our fee. The estate hosts and the suppliers are appointed by us.

The outdoor curfew here is ten in the evening, which is the earliest in our Tuscan portfolio, and it is set by the comune rather than by the estate.

Read on its own that is an early hour. Read with the rest of the pack it is simply a different shape of evening, because Mangiacane has done something few Tuscan villas have done: it has installed a professional, zoned sound system across the whole property and published the specification.

The outdoor zones carry controlled foreground music to a maximum of 85 decibels, with an automatic 8 decibel reduction from ten at night. The indoor room runs uncontrolled foreground music at 95 to 100 decibels with up to four speakers. The estate’s emission ceilings, measured at the boundary, are 55 decibels by day and 45 at night, and the installed system is designed to sit inside them.

So the ceremony, the aperitivo and the dinner all happen outdoors with real music, properly amplified, until ten. Then the party moves into the ballroom and gets genuinely loud. We design the night that way from the beginning, and we give the DJ the decibel figures at the point of booking, because a band that arrives with its own rig will spend the evening fighting a system that is already better than the one in the van.

The evening here is a matter of arithmetic.

The Olive Oil Gardens hold 250 and the ballroom holds 200. Outdoor music stops at ten. So a wedding of 250 guests eats in the garden and then moves to a ballroom for 200.

For a guest list up to 200 the evening falls into place: a garden for dinner, a loggia looking at Florence, and a loud room for afterwards. Above 200 we plan a second late space alongside the ballroom, usually the Barricaia at 100, and with Florence half an hour away the guests who prefer an earlier night are back in the city quickly.

Sixty people across 28 rooms, in two buildings.

Palazzo Machiavelli holds 22 in ten suites and rooms, one of them a royal suite, with the lounges, the historic dining room, the spa, the sauna, the Turkish bath, the treatment rooms and the top terrace over the Florence skyline. Villa Mazzei holds 38 in eighteen rooms: two classic, two superior, eight deluxe and six junior suites, with its own outdoor infinity pool beside a rose garden.

Sixty beds against 250 guests means most of the wedding sleeps in Florence, and that works well because the city is 28 minutes away. The city absorbs a guest list of any size, and the coaches run on a main road rather than a hill track.

The villa is on the Via Faltignano at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, in the comune of San Casciano in Val di Pesa, in the province of Florence.

Florence city centre is 28 minutes and the airport 32.

Florence Peretola is 32 minutes by road. Bologna is an hour and 20 and Pisa an hour and 25, and both take more long-haul flights than Florence does.

Siena is 59 minutes and Rome Fiumicino three hours and 36.

Half an hour from the middle of Florence is what makes the bed count workable here, and it is the reason this villa suits a large international guest list better than most estates of its size.

A ten o’clock outdoor finish, an installed sound system, and a ballroom for 200 beside a garden for 250.

The estate has zoned professional audio.

The estate has zoned professional audio across the grounds with published decibel ceilings. We brief the DJ on the specification and plug into it, which is cheaper than a hired rig and keeps the estate inside its own emission limits without anyone arguing at eleven o’clock.

Above 200 the dancing needs a second late room.

The ballroom takes 200 and the garden takes 250, and outdoor music ends at ten. A list above 200 needs a second late room budgeted from the start rather than improvised on the night.

The main villa alone is half the full buyout.

Palazzo Machiavelli on its own is just over €19,000 a night against just under €34,000 for the whole resort, and it carries the spa, the pool and the loggia. For a wedding where the guests sleep in Florence, that is a saving of about €45,000 across three nights.

Florence sleeps the rest of the guest list.

Sixty beds hold the families and the wedding party, and twenty-eight minutes on a main road is the easiest transfer in Chianti. We book city hotels for everyone else rather than hunting for farmhouse rooms in the hills.

Magic Day plans weddings at Villa Mangiacane from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the full buyout priced against taking Palazzo Machiavelli alone, the ceremony set in the Olive Oil Gardens with the loggias held for poor weather, dinner in the courtyard or the olive terraces, the party moved into the ballroom at ten with a second late room if the list passes 200, the DJ briefed on the estate’s own decibel specification, the suppliers all appointed by us, hotels blocked in Florence and coaches booked, and the VAT on the rental written into the contract.

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