Palazzo Shedir

Most couples who marry in a Roman church or at the Campidoglio face the same question afterwards: where do we take everyone? The usual answers are a good restaurant with other diners at the next table, or a villa an hour outside the city that turns a perfect Roman morning into a coach journey. Palazzo Shedir is the third answer, and for a wedding of up to forty it is the best one we know.

It is a real Roman palace, not a venue that looks like one. Palazzo Borghese was bought by Cardinal Camillo Borghese shortly before he became Pope Paul V, and it stayed the family's city residence for generations; Pauline Bonaparte lived here as a Borghese princess. The salons of Palazzo Shedir were built as the family's gallery and restored with care. The gilded stucco, the frescoed ceilings, the antique mirrors and the rare marbles are original. Nothing has to be brought in to make it feel grand.

It is entirely yours. For the evening, all four salons are private to your wedding: no other diners, no hotel bar next door, no one walking through. That privacy is almost impossible to find in the centre of Rome, and it changes how a small wedding feels. Your guests stop behaving like restaurant customers and start behaving like guests at a family dinner in a palace, which is exactly what they are.

It is ten minutes from everything. The palazzo stands in Campo Marzio, between Piazza di Spagna and the Tiber. The Campidoglio, the churches of the centre and your guests' hotels are minutes away. After the ceremony there is no transfer to plan, only a short ride through the most beautiful streets in the world, and at the end of the night everyone is already home.

What makes Palazzo Shedir work for a wedding is that it is not one room but a sequence of them, and the evening moves through the palace the way a Borghese reception would have done.

The Salone delle Ringhiere is where your guests arrive. Two grand staircases designed by Grimaldi rise to a small loggia that looks out over the Tiber, once the most private corner of the palace. This is where the welcome glass is poured, and if you want a short symbolic moment, a reading, the exchange of a few words in front of everyone who could not fit in the church, it happens here too.

The Salone di Diana takes the aperitivo. It is the most playful of the rooms, with bold colour and modern pieces set against the Baroque, and it is where we put the things that keep a small group mingling: a watercolour portraitist painting your guests, a sommelier, a quartet.

The Galleria degli Specchi is the heart of the night. Gilded stucco, bas-reliefs, antique Flemish mirrors and candlelight multiplied in every one of them, and a single imperial table down the middle for up to forty. One long table is the format we love here, because everyone sees everyone and the speeches feel like a family dinner rather than a banquet.

The Salone di Venere, with its frescoes of Venus, blue walls and marble busts, is where the cake is cut and the traditional confetti and favours are waiting.

Downstairs, the palace turns into a private club: a bar, a DJ, an open bar and a dance floor that belongs only to your guests. The contrast is the fun of it. You climb down from the seventeenth century into a party, and climb back up for the last glass.

Any. It is an indoor palace, which makes it one of the few venues in Rome that is as beautiful on a December night as in June, and at its most magical from October to April.

We have held a wedding at Palazzo Shedir, and a few things from that evening shape how we plan every one since.

Keep it to one table. The Gallery of Mirrors was made for a long imperial table, and forty is its natural size. That is why we offer this palace for weddings of up to forty: it is the number at which the room is full, warm and still intimate.

Light it with candles, not flowers. The mirrors multiply every flame, and a gallery lit by candlelight is more spectacular than any installation. We keep the flowers low and generous on the table and let the room do the rest.

Plan the drive as part of the day. The ride from the church or the Campidoglio to Via di Ripetta passes through the heart of Rome. In a vintage car or with the windows down at golden hour, it becomes one of the best moments for photographs, so we time it rather than treat it as a transfer.

Take the suites the night before. Getting ready in the palace gives you portraits in the Borghese rooms that nobody else can have, and a calm morning a few minutes from your ceremony.

Use every room. Couples sometimes think of the palace as a dining room. It is a sequence of five scenes, from the staircase to the club downstairs, and the evening is best when it moves through all of them.

What we bring to this one

What our wedding here taught us is mostly invisible in the photographs: how long forty guests take to climb Grimaldi's staircase with a glass in hand, where the light falls in the gallery when the candles are lit, how to bring cars into Campo Marzio's narrow streets without a traffic warden ending the photographs early.

Katerina takes your first call. She trained in hospitality and worked in hotels before joining us, and she asks first about your guests and how you want the evening to feel. Svetlana runs the client side from Rome, knows the palazzo in person, and trained as a psychologist, which on a wedding day matters more than it sounds. Laura handles the venue and the production, the suppliers and the timings. Marina answers the first enquiries and sets what we will and will not take on.

Two of us are on the ground for the whole wedding day, one with you at the ceremony and one already at the palace when the first guests arrive. When it rained at a wedding of ours, our team took the umbrellas to the guests and stood in the rain ourselves. We would do the same here. Your job that day is to get married. Ours is everything else.