Hannah & Marcus

Hannah and Marcus married at Villa Catignano, eight kilometres north-east of Siena, in the heart of Chianti Classico. I arrived the day before to walk it alone, which is what I always do: no camera, just the light. The villa was built at the end of the seventeenth century by Monsignor Lodovico Sergardi — a writer who published under the name Quinto Settano — although the small borough here, then called Clatinianum, already belonged to his family in the fifteen hundreds. You feel that continuity the moment you step into the entrance hall and find the Sergardi coat of arms above you, with the family motto: Expertus fidelem. Proven faithful. Not a bad thing to walk under on the way to your vows.

The estate runs to some six hundred acres of vineyards and olive groves, and it is really two buildings living one life: the Villa, which was the noble family’s home, and the Fattoria, the working farm that made the wine and the oil. For a film that duality is a gift. On one side frescoed rooms, hardwood floors, fireplaces and old prints; on the other, stone, terracotta, working shutters and courtyard light. You can cut from one register to the other in the same afternoon and it still feels like one place.

The heart of it is the Giardino all’Italiana. A double flight of steps lifts you from the side of the villa into three garden rooms: first the box-hedged flower beds with their clipped spheres; then, behind a screen of holm oaks, the great lawn with lemon trees in enormous terracotta pots and the statues of the Four Seasons standing watch; and finally the stretch between the lemon-house and the holm-oak bower. There are rainwater basins, a stone bust in its niche, a grotto tucked under the entrance steps, animals carved into the dividing walls. Behind the lemon-house an avenue of cypresses walks you out to a semicircular belvedere in the wood — the best two minutes of the whole day if you can steal the couple away.