Four days in Puglia, for sixty-two people who all had to flyFour days in Puglia, for sixty-two people who all had to fly

Sofia is from Lisbon, Nadine from Manchester, and they live in Berlin. There was no location that would be convenient for anyone, so they stopped trying to find one and picked somewhere everyone would want to go instead.

Puglia in early June: warm enough to eat outside every night, before the heat that makes a midday ceremony unkind.

A fortified farmhouse with eleven rooms, four hectares of olives, and a long stone terrace facing west. We took the whole thing for five nights.

Eleven rooms for sixty-two people obviously doesn’t work, so the immediate family stayed on site and everyone else took apartments in Ostuni, eight minutes away by the two minibuses we ran on a loop from six until two every night.

Thursday was arrivals and nothing scheduled, which matters more than it sounds — people land tired and want to swim, not socialise.

Friday was a long dinner under the olives for everyone who had arrived. Saturday was the wedding. Sunday was lunch that started at one and finished when the last car left at six.

The Friday dinner is the one we argue hardest for. By the time people sit down on Saturday they already know each other, and the room sounds completely different.

Our Italian is functional and not more than that. The florist in Ostuni has no English at all and is the best in the province.

We work with a fixer in Brindisi on every Puglian wedding for exactly this reason. She reads the contracts, she makes the calls, and she knows which quote is a starting position and which one is the actual price.

Civil ceremony in the Ostuni town hall at six on the Saturday evening — the legal one, twenty minutes, eleven people. Then everybody back to the masseria for the ceremony that mattered to them, on the terrace, at eight, with the light going.

Splitting the legal from the meaningful is standard abroad and it takes all the pressure off both.