Villa Tasca wedding

A hunting lodge stood here first, among vineyards outside the walls of Palermo. The Tasca d’Almerita family have held it since the sixteenth century and the house is still theirs, still lived in, and still filling with their guests.

In the eighteenth century the lodge became a villa. Andrea Giganti enlarged it around 1780 and laid out the formal garden; the nineteenth century added the follies, the grotto and the lake, and the botanist Lucio Tasca turned the parterres into a romantic park, planting conifers from the Americas and tropical species nobody had grown in Sicily before. The work was finished in 1870.

The park holds more protected monumental trees than anywhere else on the island.

Wagner walked in it in the spring of 1882, while he was finishing Parsifal in Palermo, and left a farewell piece dedicated to Beatrice Tasca when the family left the city. A century and a half later a television crew filmed the frescoes for the opening titles of The White Lotus, and the villa acquired a second, younger audience that arrives quoting it.

The house opens at five in the afternoon and the suppliers from eight in the morning, which is the rhythm of a private villa rather than a hotel.

The frescoed rooms of the noble floor, painted with classical ruins and hung with chandeliers, opening onto a balustraded terrace above the garden. They seat 200 to 240 across several rooms, which makes them the wet-weather plan and, in winter, the wedding itself.

The old stables, twelve metres by twenty-four in a single span, seating 200 at one dinner in one room. It is the space to use when a wedding wants everyone at the same table rather than spread through the house.

Palms, cycads, umbrella pines, and a lake with the pink façade reflected in it. The ceremony goes on the lawn and the aperitivo under the trees, and the sunset here is the reason to hold the ceremony late.

Where the night ends. The DJ plays here until two, after the outdoor music has stopped, and the room is small enough that the party feels like a party rather than a hall with a dance floor in it.

Six hectares of it, made over to the city in 2020 for markets and concerts, with a mandarin grove and a labyrinth. It is not the wedding’s, but it is what the wedding looks out at.

Four suites in the house: Maiolica and Contessa on the noble floor, Blu and Rosa on the garden floor. Two of them are handed to the couple on the morning of the wedding, from half past ten, for dressing and photographs, and the wedding night in the villa is bookable on top.

That is the whole of it. Villa Tasca is not a hotel and does not pretend to be, so the guest list sleeps in Palermo, which is ten minutes away and holds everything from a Rocco Forte hotel on the sea to a small palazzo in the old town.

The short drive is an argument for this villa rather than against it. Guests spend the days in Palermo, the evening in a private park, and nobody spends an hour on a coach.

The villa stands in its own park inside Palermo, entered from the Viale Regione Siciliana, with the city around it and Monreale on the hill behind.

Palermo Falcone Borsellino is 48 minutes and 34 kilometres along the coast road. The brochure says 35 minutes, and we have not once seen it done in that.

Catania is two and three quarter hours away across the island and holds the only non-stop flight from the United States, which makes it the airport for an American guest list and the drive a decision.

The historic centre is under ten minutes: the Quattro Canti, the Teatro Massimo and the station are each between seven and nine minutes by road. Mondello and its beach are twenty minutes north, Monreale fifteen minutes up the hill.

The villa is hired by the day, five in the afternoon until two in the morning, with suppliers in from eight: just under €10,000 with VAT for a weekend day in high season, and less midweek and out of season.

• Sole use of the agreed rooms and the garden, with the tour beforehand
• Two suites from half past ten for the couple to dress and be photographed
• The entrance up the monumental palm avenue, with the torches lit for an evening wedding
• Security on the gate, parking with attendants and cloakroom staff
• A wet-weather plan inside the house

The wedding. There is no kitchen for a caterer, so one is built and rented; the food, the furniture, the design, the flowers, the lighting, the sound, the photography and the transfers are all brought in; the symbolic ceremony set-up is priced separately; and clearing the noble floor, if the dinner goes there, is charged on top.

A Magic Day wedding at Villa Tasca starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000.

Buy the late hours when you book. An hour past two costs a fraction booked in advance of what it costs asked for on the night. We fix the finish with the date, and we have never regretted buying the hour and not using it.

The city sets the curfew, not the villa. Outdoor music stops at midnight midweek and one at the weekend, and this is a residential address rather than a farm in the countryside. We design the evening so the outdoor part peaks before that and the Billiard Room takes the rest.

Put the dinner in the Scuderia. The noble floor is the more beautiful room and it costs more to use, because clearing it is charged and because it divides a wedding across several rooms. We recommend the Scuderia for the dinner and the Noble Halls for the aperitivo, which gives guests both and pays for one.

Treat the family as the family. Villa Tasca is a home. The count and countess are in it, the staff are theirs, and a supplier who behaves like a contractor in somebody’s house does not come back. We brief every vendor on that before load-in.

Use Palermo. Ten minutes from the gate is a city with a Norman cathedral, a street food market and a Rocco Forte hotel on the water. A Villa Tasca wedding that keeps its guests in the city for three days and brings them to the park for one evening beats the version that tries to do everything inside the walls.

Villa Tasca gives a wedding a private park inside Palermo, a frescoed house that has belonged to one family for five centuries, and a gate that closes behind you at five in the afternoon. It does not give a kitchen, a caterer, furniture, light or sound, and it does not give beds beyond four suites.

So the work here is a build inside a listed house with a family living in it, against a curfew the city sets, with a guest list sleeping ten minutes away and arriving by coach. It is a short list of constraints and a demanding one, and it is why the weddings that work here are designed around the house rather than dropped into it.

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