Balbianello,
and the way
you arrive
Villa del Balbianello · Lake Como, Lombardy
A black-tie wedding on the promontory at Balbianello, in a May that never quite cleared. Everyone came by water: the boats left Laglio, crossed under a sky the colour of the lake, and tied up at the bottom of the terraces. Dinner was back across the water, by candlelight, in a stone gallery.
You cannot
drive to
this one
Lenno · Lake Como
A garden built
on a headland
Balbianello sits on a spit of rock with water on three sides, and the whole place is terraces, a loggia and one enormous plane tree pruned flat like a table. It is famous for good reason, and it is also the hardest kind of venue to photograph badly and the easiest to photograph predictably.
So the frames that matter here are the ones between the postcards: the crossing, the wait before the ceremony, the boat back with the veil going over the side. The loggia is on the page once, and once is enough.
And the day did not end there. Dinner was back across the water at Relais Villa Vittoria, at Laglio, by candlelight in a stone gallery — which is why the last third of this page is a different building from the first two.
Relais Villa Vittoria, where dinner was
- Ceremony
- Villa del Balbianello, Lenno
- Reception
- Relais Villa Vittoria, Laglio
- Photography
- Stefano Casati
Photographs by Stefano Casati.
A frescoed room in Volterra,
and a ring on the hill
Borgo Pignano, above the Val d’Era.
Somewhere
like this?