Three-Day, Unconventional Wedding at Antico Borgo San Lorenzo, Italy
Some weddings give you one evening. This one gave me three days — and by the end of it, I genuinely didn't want to leave.
I spent three days at Antico Borgo San Lorenzo photographing one couple's celebration, and it's exactly the kind of wedding I fell in love with photography for. Not a single event squeezed into six polished hours, but an unconventional, unfolding story — a pizza party, a ceremony, and a pool party — each day with its own feeling, its own light, its own kind of alive.
Because that's what I'm always chasing: not what a wedding is supposed to look like, but how it actually feels.
Day One: The Pizza Party
No seating chart. No script. Just pizza dough, wood smoke, and a group of people who'd mostly just met, already laughing like old friends.
There's something so disarming about starting a wedding weekend this way. Guests wandered between the pizza oven and long tables scattered across the Borgo, wine in their glasses, no performance required. I spent the evening chasing the in-between moments.
By the time the sun dropped behind the Tuscan hills, the whole thing already felt less like an event and more like a story starting to write itself.
Day Two: The Ceremony
This is where Antico Borgo San Lorenzo does something most venues can't fake. The stone walls, the worn steps, the way light moves through the courtyard across the day — it's all already exactly right, already honest.
Hydrangeas everywhere — whites, tucked along the aisle and spilling out of old stone urns, like they'd always belonged there. The sun sat warm and unhurried over the borgo, the kind of Italian light that doesn't blast or blind you, but wraps around everything instead. Soft, golden, forgiving. The kind of light that makes even the smallest gestures — a hand reaching for another, a breath before "I do" — look like they were always meant to be photographed this way.
There was a lightness to the whole ceremony that I can only describe as la dolce vita — not rushed, not rehearsed to death, just two people and the people who love them, standing still for a moment in a place that's held centuries of stories before this one. Nobody was checking a schedule. Nobody was thinking about what came next. For those thirty minutes, the only thing that existed was the moment itself — and everyone in that courtyard knew it, and let themselves simply enjoy it.
That's the thing about Italy, and about weddings like this one — they remind you, without trying, what it actually means to live. Not to perform living, not to document it for later, but to actually be inside it while it's happening.
Day Three: The Pool Party
If day one was arrival and day two was the vows, day three was pure release. No timeline left to manage, no emotional weight left to hold — just a pool, good music, and a couple, now married, finally able to exhale.
This is the part I love most as a photographer. By day three, nobody's performing for the camera anymore. People forget I'm even there. That's exactly when the real images happen — the ones that feel honest because they simply are.
Why This Kind of Unconventional Wedding Works
A traditional, single-day wedding asks a lot — cram the nerves, the joy, the tears, and the goodbyes into one evening and hope it all lands. Spreading the celebration across three days at a place like this does something different: it lets the whole thing breathe.
Guests actually get to know each other, instead of trading names once over a cocktail. The couple gets a full arc — anticipation, ceremony, release. And I get to tell an actual story, not just capture one chapter of it.
If you're dreaming of a destination wedding in Tuscany that feels less like a performance and more like you — pizza dough and bare feet and pool water and vows, all wrapped into one long, unconventional weekend — a place like Antico Borgo San Lorenzo might be exactly it.
I'm Jo, and I photograph unconventional weddings across Europe — including multi-day celebrations in Italy — on film, digital, and Super 8, for couples who want their whole story told, not just one evening of it. Let's talk.
