the house

The people who will actually be there

Name: WOWITALY Weddings
Address: Via Vittorio Spinazzola, 38, Roma, Lazio, 00164, IT
Telephone: +39 334 840 2086
Price range: €5400–€150000

We are not a wedding agency with an Italian office. We are four people who live in Italy and open it for a limited number of couples each year.

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4people who live in Italy
2016since
Rome · Como · Milanwhere we live

Rome, Lake Como, Milan. Every wedding is planned where it happens, by people who live there, and the planners who answer your messages at eleven at night through a year of planning are the ones standing behind you on the day. Nobody is parachuted in at the end.

how it started

It started with our own wedding

Marina moved to Italy in 2015. A year later she married here, a hundred and seventeen guests, and planned the whole thing herself with her husband, who has spent fifteen years working on the Sanremo Festival, Italy's biggest annual television event. So the planning was done by someone who knew Italian production from the inside and someone who was learning the country from scratch, which turned out to be the right combination.

There was a church ceremony in Sicily. The party ran until five in the morning, at which point the Italian guests folded their Armani jackets, left them on the chairs, and went swimming in the sea.

Afterwards every friend who had been there said the same thing: you have to do this for other people. WOWITALY started in 2016.

What made that wedding work was not taste, or not only taste. Marina had been organising events since school, and before Italy she ran conferences and retail events for a thousand people at Anheuser-Busch InBev. A wedding for a hundred and seventeen people in a country she had lived in for a year was, in production terms, a smaller problem than her day job.

That is still the shape of this company. Italian taste on the outside, corporate discipline underneath. It is why our couples get checklists, a shared document space and a budget spreadsheet that balances, and why they also get a party that ends in the sea.

who we are

Four people, four jurisdictions

Founder · Rome

Marina

Eleven years of weddings in Italy, and eleven years of living here. She trained first at art school, then, after moving to Rome, as a guide at the Mirabilia Guide Academy. In between there was a corporate life: conferences and retail events for a thousand people at Anheuser-Busch InBev.

That combination explains more about this company than any of the three parts alone. The eye comes from the art school, the city from the guide training, and the spreadsheets from InBev.

She reads every enquiry that comes in and decides whether this is a wedding we should be planning at all, sets what it will and will not be, and keeps the relationships with villa owners and chefs that make the rest possible. She is the one who will tell you a villa is wrong for you while you are still in love with the photographs. Her opinion is the product.

Lead planner · Lake Como

Katerina

Katerina is from Lithuania and trained in hospitality before she ever planned a wedding. She graduated with honours in Hotel and Restaurant Business from Vilniaus kolegija, the Vilnius University of Applied Sciences, and then spent her career in hotels: the Crowne Plaza in Cyprus, part of InterContinental Hotels Group, then Strawberry, the Nordic hotel group, in Norway, and finally Varenna, on Lake Como.

We met because she looked after us. Marina was staying at the hotel in Varenna with a photographer, and Katerina was running it. The way she took care of two people who were not her problem, not politely but as though it genuinely mattered, was why Marina offered her a job. We did not hire a wedding planner and teach her hospitality. We hired hospitality and taught her weddings.

She still lives on the lake, in Lecco, and was married in church here herself. She has walked every villa on this site in February and in August, which are two different places, and she knows their owners and their chefs by name rather than by email address. She takes the first call with every couple, runs your wedding from that call to the last guest, and she is the person you write to at eleven at night.

Lead planner · Rome

Svetlana

Svetlana has always believed that the most beautiful stories are the ones we create in real life. Even as a little girl, she was drawn to stories about love, the people who found each other, and the small moments that could change someone's life forever. Perhaps that is why she eventually chose to study people rather than stories.

She graduated with honours in psychology and spent several years in family counselling, learning to understand not only what people say, but also what they feel and sometimes struggle to express. Fifteen years ago, life brought her to Italy, where she continued her education in linguistics, tourism and photography. Somewhere along the way, her fascination with human connections found a new expression in creating weddings.

Roman churches, Roman permits, Roman palazzi. She handles the parts of an Italian wedding that cannot be done from abroad: the six months of paperwork before a Catholic ceremony, the town hall appointments for a civil one, and the conversations in Italian that decide whether a thing is possible.

The counselling matters more than it sounds. Two families who have never met, in a language neither of them speaks, on the most watched day of their lives. Somebody has to notice what is actually happening in the room, several hours before anyone else does. That is usually Svetlana.

Venue research and coordination · Milan

Laura

Laura came to Italy in 2019, spent her first year in Venice learning the language, and has been in Milan ever since. Her education is not the usual route into this work: a degree in International Politics, Law and Economics from the University of Milan, and a master's in Data Science for Economics at the same university now.

She knows what each villa costs, what it hides in the contract and what happens there when it rains. Nothing reaches your proposal before she has checked it, which is why the budgets on this site are real numbers rather than ranges we hope will hold.

On the day she is on site coordinating, so the person who checked your contract in March is the one counting the chairs in June. Very little gets lost in a handover that never happens.

She also paints. We do not think that is a coincidence. The same person who notices that a contract clause does not add up is the one who notices that a colour is wrong, and a wedding needs both.

a small confession

One slightly ridiculous thing about this team

All four of us graduated with honours. Nobody was hired for a transcript, and we only noticed the pattern when we wrote this page.

It does explain something, though. The sort of person who could not hand in a thesis that was nearly right is the same sort who cannot look at a seating plan that is nearly right, or a contract clause that almost adds up, or a shade of ivory that is almost the one you chose. On a wedding that trait is either very useful or very annoying, depending on whether you are the couple or the supplier.

For you it is useful.

not one person

Why three of us know your wedding, not one

The fear nobody says out loud when they hire a planner three thousand miles away is simple: what if she stops answering.

Your celebration never depends on one person being available. Three of us know your wedding in full, from the budget to which of your aunts cannot sit near which uncle, and one of us is always in the city where it is happening. That is not redundancy for its own sake. It is the only honest way to promise a date eighteen months out.

It also means the first voice you hear is not the founder's, and we would rather explain that than let you wonder. Marina reads your enquiry and decides whether we are the right team for your wedding. Then Katerina takes the first call, because she is the one who will plan it and she lives where it will happen. You are not being passed down a ladder. You are starting with the person who will still be there at the end, which is the right way round and not the usual one.

And there is a limit to how many weddings four people can do properly, so we take a limited number each season. That is not a sales line, it is a calendar.

The WOWITALY team at a wedding on Lake Como

where we come from

We came from tourism, not from weddings

Most wedding planners start with weddings. We did not.

Since 2016 WOWITALY has run guided experiences, quests and workshops across Rome. Marina and Svetlana both trained as guides at the Mirabilia Guide Academy in Rome, and Svetlana went on to study tourism and photography. Katerina's background is hotels. Between us we have spent a decade thinking about what a visitor to Italy needs on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing is scheduled.

That side of the business is reviewed by the people it serves rather than described by us: 5.0 out of 5 across 154 reviews, third of 1,783 in its category in Rome, and a TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice award. Those are our guests talking, not our marketing.

That is why we are unusual about your guests. A wedding abroad is not one day for the people who fly in for it. It is four days in a country most of them do not know, with a language they do not speak, and for a third of them it is their first time in Italy. Someone has to decide where they eat on the Thursday, who takes the grandparents from the airport, what happens for the ones who do not want a boat trip, and which of the three restaurants in the village is actually good.

Most planners treat that as outside the job. We treat it as the job. It is where the weekend is won or lost, and it is the reason our couples keep writing afterwards that their friends and family had the best few days of their lives.

Your wedding is one day. Your guests remember the weekend.

when it rains

The umbrella test

Every couple planning a wedding in another country carries the same fear, and it is never about the flowers. It is the fear of standing somewhere unfamiliar when something goes wrong and finding that nobody is there.

Rain is where you find out who you hired.

At one of our larger weddings the sky opened in the middle of the evening. We went for the umbrellas and handed them out to the guests one by one, and we finished that night soaked through, because there were not enough umbrellas for everyone and we were not the ones who had flown across the world to be there.

It is a small thing and it is also the whole job. Nobody writes the umbrellas into a contract. You find out on the day whether the person you hired thinks they are holding one for you or for themselves.

Our couples tend to write about this afterwards rather than about the styling.

I will never forget how you pushed through a wall of rain to reach my tower.

Kaya and Ayk · Rome, September 2024

You turned a thunderstorm into fireworks.

Viktorin and Valeria · Lake Como, May 2025

And the driver who stood in the rain, holding an umbrella over us.

Anastasia and Pablo · Lake Como, May 2025

reviews

In our couples' words

From our very first video call with Marina, Sveta and Katya, we instantly clicked. Detailed checklists and budget spreadsheets, a shared space with every document, and they guided us through the paperwork for our legal ceremony and the visas for us and our guests. When we arrived at the villa on our wedding day the magic was already happening, and everything ran smoothly without us having to worry about a thing.

For a year and a half we planned our fifty-guest wedding at Villa Aura together with WowItaly. Everything was perfect from the very beginning: easy communication, honesty, real attention to detail. Our friends and family all agreed that the day turned out wonderful and truly heartfelt.

first step

Let's see whether we are the right team

Tell us your date, how many people you want around you, and what you would like your guests to say about the weekend afterwards. That last question tells us more than the budget does.

Katerina takes the first call, because she is the one who will plan your wedding. On it you get an honest read on whether your wedding is one we should be planning, real numbers for your date, and, if we are not the right team, a straight answer about who is.

Plan your date

hello@wowitaly-weddings.com · +39 334 840 2086 · Rome · Lake Como. Since 2016.