How to start planning your Italian Wedding
Hello, it’s Lucy here, one half of Wiskow & White. This is a new era for our blog; we’re going to share more of our advice and ideas, gathered from planning over 60 weddings in Italy together as ‘Wiskow & White’.
On our first call with new potential couples, we often hear the words, ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘confused’ as well as ‘trust’ and ‘clarity’. It seems that between the reams of internet pages on Italian weddings, Instagram, Pinterest, blogs and the many ‘wedding planners’ out there, the dream of a simple and elegant Italian wedding can soon become daunting and overwhelming. I know, I’ve been there myself!
As planners we aim to cut through all of that noise and take our couples along the easiest path of planning their specific wedding in Italy. It’s not always a straight path (this is Italy we’re working in! And we’re only human!) but we have buckets of experience and the skills to make it happen, and we pride ourselves in the process that we’ve built to make it as smooth and efficient as possible.
So, you’re thinking of planning your wedding in Italy – where do you start? The first stop is to do some research, but perhaps not too much (reference overwhelm above). Get to know roughly what you like and don’t like, not worrying too much about the details of how you’ll actually make it happen and come together. Then chat to some people – perhaps a few planners, or find someone that’s married in Italy before (there are some great forums out there). Take their advice, delve a little deeper into how to make the wedding a reality and most importantly, find someone you connect with and that you can trust to bring your wedding to life. It’s not a straight forward job and a pretty Instagram alone isn’t a strong CV.
Trust between us and our couples is hugely important to us. Transparency within your relationship, your decisions and where your money is going should be central to the planning of your wedding. Without this transparency, I don’t truly believe a couple would ever be entirely comfortable in planning their wedding. And what fun is wedding planning if it’s not comfortable for you?
From the start, you should have a clear contract in place and a clear idea of your budget. We’d recommend clearly having this split out between the suppliers you think you’ll need to create your wedding, and prioritising this before you book even your planner, or your venue. The priorities you’ve made here should determine the order in which you plan your wedding. For example, venue and catering do tend to come first, but if music is really important to you, perhaps this should be booked next so that you know what’s remaining for other areas. If you leave music till later down the line, you may have overspent on other less important areas and have to bust the budget for your dream musicians.
Budgets always flux and money moves between the different areas, but if you have this set out and defined from the start, you’ll always know where you are and it should make decision making easier too. You planner should track your budget for you.
Hopefully that’s got you started if you’re early on in your wedding planning journey. If you like our blog and want to hear more from us on specific subjects, please let us know! We’re thinking of covering a huge range of things based on the questions we’re most commonly asked by our couples, as well as the advice we most often give. But we’re up for chatting about anything and everything that you want to know!