A Photographer’s Guide to 5 Villas: Villa Palmieri, Gamberaia, Cora, La Massa, and di Maiano, from behind the camera

There’s no shortage of wedding venues in Florence. But the brochures don’t tell you much about what they’re actually like on the day. Villa Palmieri, Villa Gamberaia, Villa Cora, Villa La Massa, Villa di Maiano. On paper, they all sound like “historic Tuscan villa.” In person, they feel nothing alike. Some are private estates you take over entirely for a weekend. Others are five-star hotels with a pool for guests to recover by. One splits your whole day across five different spaces without you ever repeating a backdrop.

So instead of another list of amenities, here’s what we’ve actually noticed shooting at these five venues. Which rooms the light loves in the late afternoon. Which ones want fewer guests, and which ones want three hundred. And where a wedding weekend actually lives outside the ceremony itself. If you’re choosing between them, this should save you a few site visits.

How these five Florence wedding venues actually compare

Among wedding venues in Florence, the first real fork in the road is private estate versus hotel. Villa Palmieri, Villa Gamberaia, and Villa di Maiano are all private estates. They’re booked exclusively for your day, with no other wedding happening alongside yours and no other guests passing through. That’s what “private” actually buys you: nobody else’s wedding photos have that exact light in them. Because nobody else is there. None of the three have rooms on site, though. So your own guests stay nearby rather than in the venue itself.

Villa La Massa and Villa Cora, by contrast, are both five-star hotels, part of established luxury groups. That means guests can stay where the wedding happens, plus there’s a pool for the slow, unstructured hours between events. Some hotels can be bought out for full exclusivity too, but that’s worth confirming venue by venue rather than assuming.

Villa Palmieri – a different backdrop for every part of the day

What we love photographing at Villa Palmieri is that it doesn’t ask you to pick one setting and stay there. The day genuinely moves. The villa terrace works for an aperitivo, a ceremony, or the wedding dinner itself, depending how you want to shape the day. The lower garden is where most couples put the aperitivo instead – enclosed, intimate, golden in the early evening. The old tennis courts, meanwhile, have been reimagined as an open, unstructured space for a ceremony or dinner. And the inner courtyard is usually where the night ends: the after-party, contained inside old stone walls, with its own separate energy from everything that came before it.

For photography, Villa Palmieri is generous: stone staircases, garden arches, and sculpted topiary hedges. That’s the kind of neatly clipped, ornamental greenery that lines the paths and photographs almost like architecture in its own right, plus some of the most reliable sunsets we shoot all year. Despite its age, it’s a genuinely practical venue for a modern wedding, comfortable up to 250 guests and about twenty minutes by car from central Florence.

A typical day here tends to move through:

• Welcome cocktails with Florence laid out below you
• Outdoor dining beneath centuries-old trees
• Dancing under the open Tuscan sky
• A late-evening shift indoors, into the villa’s ballroom, once the air cools

We’ve had the privilege of working at Palmieri alongside planners like Distinctive Italy Weddings, Infinity Weddings Italy, and Savvy Event Studio

See the full Villa Palmieri wedding gallery here

Villa La Massa – a five-star hotel with the Arno running through it

Villa La Massa is a different kind of venue entirely – part of the Villa d’Este Group and a member of The Leading Hotels of the World, which shows in how smoothly it runs a wedding weekend. We think of it as the Renaissance rebuilt for modern comfort, with centuries-old gardens sitting alongside the kind of service only an actual hotel can offer.

A day that can move outside or in

Because it’s a hotel first, the day can move outside just as easily as it moves indoors. A ceremony on the riverside lawn, dinner under the stars on one of the terraces, or the whole evening tucked into one of the frescoed rooms if the weather, or just the mood, calls for it.

The grounds are genuinely large too, with enough separate outdoor spaces that it works especially well for multi-day celebrations. The welcome dinner, the wedding day itself, and the farewell party can all happen right here, each in a different corner of the property, without ever repeating a setting. And there’s a pool, which sounds like a small detail until you’re three days into a wedding weekend and your guests need somewhere to actually rest between events.

Photographically, this is a venue built around the river. The Arno runs right past the terraces, and between the water, the gardens, and the old stone facades, you get both grand and intimate frames without ever leaving the property. It’s about twenty minutes by car from Florence’s center.

Real weddings at Villa La Massa

We’ve shot everything from a chuppah on the riverside lawn to a market-themed cocktail hour to guests still dancing well past midnight. None of it ever felt repetitive, which is the real advantage of a venue this size. So if your wedding is stretching across more than one day, La Massa is one of the few venues on this list built to actually carry that.

We’ve had the privilege of working at Villa La Massa Florence alongside Savvy Event Studio. Check full gallery here.

Villa Gamberaia – Renaissance gardens above Settignano

Villa Gamberaia doesn’t need much dressing up. Perched above Florence in Settignano, it’s known for Italianate gardens that have influenced garden design for centuries. It’s also known for the kind of panoramic Arno Valley view that makes every golden hour here feel slightly unfair to other venues.

Almost everything happens outside here – Gamberaia has a real range of spaces, from small and intimate to large enough for a full reception, for both the ceremony and the dinner.

For a smaller ceremony or a smaller wedding dinner, there’s the Grotto, a stone chamber built into the garden wall – cool, dim, and quietly dramatic.

Most couples choose to marry at the Nymphaeum instead – what we’d call a theatre of greenery, framed by ancient cypresses, at the end of the garden’s central aisle.

Then there’s the panoramic terrace, wide and furnished, looking out over Florence and the valley – where almost everyone ends up for golden hour.

Between the Grotto, the Nymphaeum, the terrace, and the wider gardens, Gamberaia genuinely scales from an intimate elopement to a full outdoor celebration of up to 180 guests. Nearly every corner doubles as its own backdrop, which is part of why we’re always glad when a couple books this venue.

Villa di Maiano – a terrace above the whole valley

Set in the green hills between Fiesole and Florence, about fifteen minutes out, Villa di Maiano is a 15th-century residence built around one incredible view.

The terrace is the real signature here – wide open, looking out over Florence, Fiesole, and the countryside in between. The Italian Gardens and Oak Gardens give you quieter corners nearby for portraits, away from the main event. Indoors is its own reward too – the frescoed rooms make for some of our favorite indoor portraits on this list, especially useful if the weather turns.

The venue comfortably holds up to 300 guests, and it’s about fifteen minutes by car from central Florence. The grounds are big enough for a proper celebration, and the night doesn’t have to wind down early – there’s plenty of space to keep the party going well past dinner.

We’ve had the privilege of working at Palmieri alongside Distinctive Italy Weddings.

Villa Cora – the most versatile address in Florence

Villa Cora is a five-star hotel just a short walk from the heart of Florence. What we like most about it is how well it carries an entire wedding weekend without ever repeating itself: the ceremony by the fountain, aperitivo out in the gardens, a properly royal reception in the Hall of Mirrors, and a welcome party or farewell brunch by the pool.

The Hall of Mirrors is the room that makes the biggest impression – Baroque, gilded, and genuinely reminiscent of Versailles.

If what you want is for your wedding weekend to feel like staying inside one continuously beautiful hotel, Villa Cora delivers. Ceremony, dinner, and every quiet moment between, all under the same roof – and it’s hard to beat this close to the center of Florence.

Five villas, five completely different weddings. None of them is the “best” one. They’re just different days, and the right villa is really just the day you want.

After photographing editorial weddings across all five of these venues, our honest advice is this: don’t choose based on the prettiest photos you’ve seen online, choose based on how you actually want the day to feel. Big and layered, or quiet and contained. Hotel-easy, or entirely your own for the weekend. The venue sets the stage, but it’s still your day that fills it.

We’re Nakutis Photography, and we shoot candid, editorial wedding photography across Florence and the rest of Italy. If one of these villas is on your shortlist, or you’re still deciding, we’d love to hear about your day – GET IN TOUCH and let’s talk through what it could look like.