Italy / City — Rome
Rome wedding photographer
— Approach
The best part of Rome happens after the photographs
The two of us have a favourite moment in Rome, and it isn't a monument. It's the end of a dawn shoot, when we take the couple to a proper old bar, the kind with the steel counter and the barista who has worked there since before any of us were born, and everyone has breakfast together. Cornetti, coffee standing up, the city not quite awake yet. After a decade of weddings here, that small ordinary half hour is still the part we look forward to most.
We shoot Rome at first light on purpose. The historic centre at six in the morning is a different city: empty, cool, quiet enough to hear your own footsteps. The classic monuments we mostly leave alone, they photograph the same for everyone. What we look for instead are the streets that actually sound like Rome. A market stall being set up. A wall with jasmine growing across it. A corner with an old Fiat 500 parked where it has probably sat for years. Rome gives you everything within a few hundred metres: the narrow alley, the crowded market, the empty monumental piazza, the park where you feel like the only two people alive.
For the wedding day itself, our most useful advice is unglamorous: do as much as you can in one place. Getting ready at a hotel, the ceremony at one venue, the reception at another, it sounds elegant on paper, but Rome is the capital, there is always something happening, and the wrong hour or a road closure can quietly derail an entire timeline. The venues we know best hold a full day comfortably on their own: Villa Aurelia, Villa Miani, Hotel de Russie.
One wedding stays with us. An American couple, three days in Rome: a welcome dinner at Hotel de Russie, the wedding at Villa Miani looking out over the whole city, and then, instead of a polished farewell brunch, lunch at Da Giggetto, a deeply traditional restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto. The bride had been going there since she was a child, brought by her parents on family trips to Rome. The dining room is still pure 1970s, untouched. The fried artichokes are exactly as good as she remembered. Nothing about that lunch was designed for a camera, which is precisely why it became the best set of photographs of the three days.
We'll admit one thing plainly: we love the dolce vita. The iconography, the films that came out of it, yes, it's a cliché, and we walk straight into it with both feet. Rome earns it.
— Selected work
From Rome, recently
— Frequently asked
Questions about this place.
- 01
01 — When is the best time of year to get married in Rome?
April through June, then September and October. Those are the months we'd choose ourselves, the light is kind and the city is liveable. We'd steer you away from July and August. It's genuinely too hot, hot enough that the Romans themselves leave for the coast, which means you'll also find many of the best traditional restaurants and shops closed for the summer holidays. If your date lands in high summer, we plan around it: shoot at dawn, build long shaded breaks into the day, and keep the afternoon slow.
- 02
02 — Which Rome venues do you know well?
Three we return to: Villa Aurelia, Villa Miani, the view over the city from up there is hard to beat, and Hotel de Russie in the centre. We're also happy to shoot beyond the obvious choices; some of our favourite frames come from the back streets rather than the famous addresses. If you're still deciding, ask us what each place is like at different hours of the day. That conversation is usually more useful than another folder of saved images.
- 03
03 — Can you really photograph in the centre of Rome? Isn't it chaos?
It is chaos, almost everywhere, almost always, and you can still photograph anywhere. That's the trade. Our answer is the early morning: at dawn the crowds aren't there yet, the heat hasn't arrived, and the city belongs to you for an hour or two. We avoid the most photographed monuments on principle and head for the alleys and small scenes that actually tell you where you are. Look at a photograph taken in Rome and you know instantly it's Rome, there's no mistaking it.
- 04
04 — Should we plan the day across several locations?
We'd gently push the other way. The most common timeline mistake in Rome is spreading the day across a hotel, a ceremony venue and a separate reception. Rome is the capital of Italy, there is always an event, a closure, a procession, and a single badly timed transfer can throw off everything that follows. Picking one venue that can hold the whole day removes the one variable you can't control: the traffic. It also means more time with the people you love and less time in a car.
- 05
05 — Do you work with wedding planners in Rome?
We work with whoever you choose, and we work well with most planners in the city. A few we've collaborated with and trust completely: Parade Wedding, Moments Lab, Biancoantico. If you don't have a planner yet and would like a recommendation, tell us the kind of wedding you're imagining and we'll point you toward the right fit rather than just a name.
— Begin the conversation