A Sunset-Colored Wedding Above Florence That Bloomed from Aisle to Veil

A Closer Look

Florence has spent centuries perfecting stone, gold and solemn grandeur. Jessica and Billy answered it with spring. At Collegio alla Querce, high in the hills with the Duomo rising out of the rooftops below, Brenda Babcock Celebrations shaped the day around orange, coral, yellow and red. Those are the colors of a Tuscan hillside waking up, not a Renaissance chapel, and the result read less like a ceremony staged against a famous view than a party the season was throwing.

Nina e i Fiori made the ceremony feel as if it had grown there on its own. Poppies tumbled across the lawn in orange, coral and yellow, tangled with blue hydrangea, while forsythia and white branches reached up the curved balustrade. Nothing was clipped into shape, and that looseness was the point. Poppies are among the most fleeting flowers a florist can choose, lasting only days once cut, so a wedding built on them is built for one moment and no other. Every stem looked thrilled to be there.

Jessica kept her own look clean, in a high-neck column gown with nothing to compete with the color, and then slipped the garden in anyway. Her cathedral veil was edged in embroidered blossoms of orange, coral and ivory, so the ceremony's palette followed her the whole way down the aisle. Her bouquet of orange and yellow poppies and deep red blooms let a few strands hang free with the same untamed habit as the arrangements around her. Billy's red boutonniere hinted at where the evening was headed.

Two scarlet lions arrived for a Chinese lion dance, a ritual meant to scare off bad luck and call in good fortune, and they came bearing blessings in gold. One banner wished the couple hearts joined for life, and the other a hundred years of happy union. Under green Florentine shutters, a Chinese tradition and a Tuscan spring turned out to want exactly the same thing for Jessica and Billy.

Dinner filled a vaulted hall under a coffered ceiling. Two long tables ran either side of a green runner, lined in orange chairs, and brass candelabras held coral tapers above them. Low clusters of poppies and roses wandered down the linens. Each place held a pink-and-red patterned plate on a beaded glass charger, a blush napkin tied with silk ribbon and a card sealed in red wax. A gilded sunburst crowned the far wall.

Then the room went dark, and the sunburst came to life. A pair of enormous wings strung with tiny lights unfolded ray by ray into a sunburst of their own, and it outshone every candle on the tables. Jessica and Billy cut their cake in its glow.