A Florence Wedding, and a Goodbye to the City That Made Us

In November 2023, my wife Gaby and I got married inside the Sala Rossa of Palazzo Vecchio, walked the streets of Florence in the rain with two good friends behind the cameras, and threw a party at Palazzo San Niccolò with the people we love most. Two weeks later, we packed up our life and moved to Recco, on the Ligurian coast, to begin a new chapter.

I had lived in Florence for twelve years.

This is the story of that day – the morning light, the rain, the walk, the ceremony, the lunch, the sunset at Piazzale Michelangelo, and the dance party I will think about for the rest of my life. It’s also, I think, the story of a photographer having his photos taken for one of the biggest days of his life, and what it felt like to finally let go of the camera.

The night before our big day, we slept at Palazzo San Niccolò. We decided to stay the night there, as the party on our wedding night would be in the same building, so it just made sense to wake up where the day would eventually end. Gaby, the meticulously organized one between us, had spent months planning the wedding down to almost every detail. But, the photography was a part she was happy to hand over, and I was naturally glad to take it on.

Fernando, Gaby’s hairdresser and one of the great calming presences of any wedding morning, arrived while it was still dark. He started on Gaby’s hair and makeup first. I woke up at some point after, showered, put my pajamas back on, and we swapped places so he could do my hair next. Once I was done, we made very sure I couldn’t see her again until we were both outside – we wanted a real first look, in real light, with no cheating.

I finished getting ready, and right at sunrise our two photographer friends, Lorenzo and Alanah, arrived downstairs. I went out to meet them while Gaby finished up.

Now, a word about Lorenzo and Alanah, because this says something about how I see people as much as it does about photography.

They aren’t wedding photographers, and for me, that was exactly the point. I wasn’t looking for someone to document our wedding as just that. I wanted it seen through the eyes and lens of the people whose command of light and composition I trusted. Whose style – dramatic, contrasty, a little bit cinematic – matched the kind of day I knew our wedding was going to be. And, luckily for us, they happened to be our friends. 

I’ve been telling clients for over a decade that the connection between subject and photographer matters more than the gear, the resume, or the portfolio. Someone you actually know can get you to genuinely laugh. They can read your face. You don’t tense up when they raise the camera. Then you find yourself on the other end of the lens on one of the most important days of your own life, and the advice you’ve been giving to others for years hits in a different register entirely.

No one is ever going to shoot a scene exactly the way you would, and if you’ve chosen the right people, that’s a gift, not a flaw.

In the weeks before the wedding, we sat with Lorenzo and Alanah over drinks a few times to coordinate. We talked through the route, the rough timing, what mattered most to us, and the practical stuff too – including the fact that the Sala Rossa is a notoriously difficult room to shoot and a flash would be essential. By the time we were standing in front of Palazzo San Niccolò at sunrise, there was nothing left to figure out.

When Gaby came out of the building, I was turned away so Lorenzo and Alanah could catch her first steps toward me on their own. Then I turned around.

The morning light was soft and low, and there she was. I remember telling myself, very specifically, ‘Don’t cry. Don’t make the bride cry. Breathe. Breathe.’

We grabbed our umbrellas and started walking up the hill from San Niccolò toward San Miniato al Monte.

I’d been watching the forecast for weeks. November in Florence has a habit of keeping you guessing, but I knew there were certain images I wanted to catch regardless of the sky. So I bought four different kinds of transparent umbrellas; different sizes and shapes, so we’d have exactly what we need. 

Even if it had rained the entire walk, we’d still have a beautiful, fully-composed photoshoot underneath them. Thankfully, we got drizzle and showers with dry periods in between – the best of both worlds. Being over-prepared meant we could laugh through the wet stretches instead of being miserable on our wedding day.

This is where I could utilize my experience of twelve years living in Florence. I knew where the light would land each hour, which streets would be empty, and the best route so Gaby wouldn’t get worn out in her dress. Knowing the city this intimately – not as a visitor, but as someone who had walked it for over a decade – meant we never had to chase a shot. Admittedly, planning your wedding photo walk down to the minute is a very photographer kind of thing to do. But it worked like a charm.

We climbed up to San Miniato al Monte and staged a few photos around its iconic staircase, then walked over to Piazzale Michelangelo for the wide views of Florence laid out below us – Brunelleschi’s dome anchoring the whole composition and the Arno cutting through. The rain came and went. The light shifted with the clouds. None of this was a problem. If anything, the weather was doing us a favor, giving every frame a depth and a mood that a flat sunny morning never would have produced.

From there, we walked down through the rose garden to take a few photos on our way back toward San Niccolò and continued on to Santa Croce.

Santa Croce is the most meaningful piazza in the city for us, and I should explain why, because it’s the part of our story that people are always surprised to hear.

Gaby and I met during the pandemic. By that point, I had lived in Florence for a decade, but she arrived in January of 2020 – just a few months before the world closed. In that spring, Italy went under lockdown and you could only leave the house, within a tight radius, for essential reasons. The legal exception I had was Banksy – my dog – who I would walk to piazza Santa Croce. I rescued Banksy in November 2019, which in hindsight may be the most consequential decision I’ve ever made because it turned out that Gaby also had a dog.

She also happened to live within walking distance of the piazza. So, there we were – a small group of us all keeping our distance yet waiting for our dogs to finish running around. There would be a nod and a wave before setting off home. Gaby and I started recognizing each other and our dogs, even with our masks on. The quick hellos from a distance turned into slightly longer hellos. Then real conversations, albeit fragmented between our allocated walking time slots in the mornings and evenings. At some point in one of those fragments, she learned I was a photographer with an Instagram account, so we swapped contacts. 

It feels totally surreal that I met the love of my life in an empty piazza in what felt like a ghost town, simply because we both had dogs and lived inside the same arbitrary legal radius. I don’t say “fate” lightly, but I don’t really have another word for it.

So standing in front of Santa Croce, that same piazza, on our wedding morning three and a half years later, felt like its own kind of vow.

By this point in the wedding walk we genuinely needed a cappuccino. So we stopped by Vivoli. They’ve been making gelato in Florence since 1929, and the people who run it are friends of ours. So, walking in on our wedding morning was like dropping in on extended family – warm, unfussy, completely without ceremony.

Exactly the kind of welcome you want at hour three of a long day. They cheered, hugged us, made us our drinks, and cheered us some more. We took a few photos in that little space, warmed up by the coffee and the friendship.

Vivoli will always have a place in our hearts, and it has nothing to do with gelato and everything to do with the people inside. Actually, after the pandemic was over, I gifted Vivoli with a work of art as a sign of thanks for their support and presence during that difficult time. It is still hanging inside their shop even to this day.

From Vivoli we crisscrossed through the Florence streets toward the Duomo, hitting a few specific spots I’d picked out in advance. Then on through Piazza della Repubblica, down Via Tornabuoni, and over to Ponte Santa Trinità – which is the bridge you stand on to photograph Ponte Vecchio properly. Most people make the mistake of trying to photograph Ponte Vecchio from Ponte Vecchio. You can’t. You have to be on the next bridge over.

This was the one shot of the day where I gave Lorenzo and Alanah specific direction. The light on Ponte Santa Trinità is tricky – the foreground and background want to fight each other for exposure, and the clouds were moving fast that morning. That meant the light was shifting by the second and was threatening to blow out the background or cast us into total shadow. I knew exactly how I wanted us framed in relation to the light, and I wanted to time the shutter with a particular gap in the clouds. So I called that one. Everywhere else, I just let them work.

There’s a real difference between giving direction during a shoot and trying to hold all of that in your head while also being the subject, being present, and being a person about to get married. That’s why you hire people you trust – so you can stop being the photographer for a few hours and just be present in your own day.

From there we doubled back toward the Uffizi and ended the photo walk in Piazza della Signoria – in front of where we were about to be married. It’s also where I had proposed back in March. Same piazza, same stones, just eight months apart. We took a few photos there, then headed back to the house to freshen up. Fernando (I mentioned him earlier – Gaby’s hairdresser) was holding the fort at home – by which I mean he was busy getting all the moms ready. Bless him.

It was time to walk over to Palazzo Vecchio.

I headed out first to give Gaby a little extra time, so that she could arrive after we’d all gathered. I met our guests outside the palazzo and waited until our group was called. Then, I led everyone up the stairs to the Sala Rossa. The wedding venue.

Stepping into Sala Rossa is like stepping back in time. You don’t fully process where you are until you’re standing inside it. Some of my family had flown from the US and had never even been to Europe before – I could feel their sense their awe arriving in waves. 

An American and a Hungarian, allowed to be married inside the Palazzo Vecchio, in the Sala Rossa, simply because we were residents of Florence – sometimes I still think my life isn’t real.

A small photographer’s note for anyone planning to get married in Sala Rossa: the room is built for atmosphere, not for photography. The lighting is moody and uneven, and a flash is essential for many of the key shots. Years earlier I’d helped photograph a friend’s wedding in the same room, so I knew exactly what to expect and could brief Lorenzo and Alanah on it in advance. Nothing in there caught us off guard.

As planned, Gaby entered and she was escorted by both of her parents. She was radiant in a way I will never forget. The ceremony was led by one of the city’s celebranti – a wonderful man with a great sense of humor – and ran in Italian, which is how it has to be. When it came time for the vows, Gaby and I exchanged ours in English so that everyone in the room could understand.

We signed the documents that made everything legal, and then came the group photos, which is its own small marathon worth describing because no one ever warns you about it. There are more combinations than you have to remember to plan for. 

Her immediate family. Her extended family. My immediate family. My extended family. Both families together. The two of us with Nico and Erica, our witnesses. Friends. This is exactly why I recommend always having at least two photographers shooting a wedding: one works through the must-capture shot list, and the other keeps moving around catching everything else. You don’t end up with a beautiful family portrait at the cost of missing a candid moment three meters away.

Once we got outside to rejoin the larger group at the entrance of Palazzo Vecchio, we took the big group photo. Of course, our two boys – Banksy and Jack – joined us. We’d coordinated in advance with our dog sitter from Tuscan Hound to dress them in their little tuxedo outfits and join us. Two dogs, two tuxedos, one wedding party, one Palazzo Vecchio. Given that Banksy and Jack are the reason Gaby and I met in the first place, having them both in that photo – in their little tuxes, in front of the building we’d just been married in – is something we will cherish forever.

Then the rain started again.

Our lunch reservation was at Beppa Fioraia, about a fifteen-minute walk away, and we had a small army of guests with us. So I did the only reasonable thing: I pulled out a pre-prepared party playlist, handed my JBL speaker to our friend Guido, and the entire wedding party turned into a walking street party through Florence in the rain. People ducked into shops, ducked back out, sang along, got cheered and clapped by strangers along the way. Gaby and I took a taxi and met them all there a few minutes later.

We didn’t fully appreciate what had happened on that walk until later, when guest after guest came up to us at the restaurant to tell us about it. They were all still laughing at the joyous absurdity and uniqueness of it all. No one had ever been to a wedding that did this. The rain, the speaker, the random shop dives, the cheering strangers – it had forced the group to stay together, to follow the music, to be inside the vibe rather than around it. People who hadn’t met before that morning were arm in arm by the time they got to the restaurant. Our hearts filled up listening to them describe it back to us.

Lunch at Beppa Fioraia was exactly our kind of food. Big shared taglieri, primi, steak to finish, prosecco for the toasts, red and white wine flowing. It was loud and warm and unhurried.

From the restaurant it was a five-minute walk to the party venue at Palazzo San Niccolò. Everyone settled in for a bit, and then Gaby and I gathered the out-of-town guests and walked them up to Piazzale Michelangelo for sunset. Most of them were only in Florence for a couple of days, and I wasn’t going to let them leave without standing at that overlook with the city catching the last of the November light. We had another prosecco toast up there, all of us together, and just took it in. I remember feeling overwhelmingly grateful that all of these people had crossed oceans and continents to be with us.

By the time we got back to Palazzo San Niccolò, aperitivo was set up, drink tickets were being handed out for cocktails, beer and wine were open bar, and our DJ Marco was warming up.

Before the dancing started, one of my best friends, Georgette – Nico’s (one of our witnesses) partner – took the mic and kicked off a round of speeches. Several of our family members and closest friends got up to speak, shared their love with us, and told some stories. Even Gabor, Gaby’s father, told the entire story of how we met, and the story of our relationship from the perspective of our dogs which was also quite unique and pretty funny.

Then we danced.

I had spent weeks curating the playlist and sent it over to Marco in advance. He took it and ran with it – the classics everyone would love, a long stretch of Latin music, a few personal surprises threaded in. At one point, completely unplanned in the moment but absolutely planned in the music, a few songs dropped that pulled me and a startling number of guests into an actual mosh pit on the dance floor. Some of these people hadn’t moshed in fifteen or twenty years. Some had never moshed in their lives.

This is the part of the night where I want to be honest. We’ve all been to weddings. We know how they can go – some drama, someone drinks too much, energy dips, awkward stretches, a bunch of guests sneak out early. Ours wasn’t like that. I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying it because I still don’t fully understand how it happened. The energy never broke. Everyone was in sync. People were dancing, talking, laughing, falling into new friendships in real time. We had a fixed end to the night, so it wasn’t that it went on longer than expected – it was that the room never came down.

Gaby and I will remember that night for the rest of our lives as the moment we brought a group of extraordinary humans into one room and watched something happen that we couldn’t have engineered if we’d tried. We can still see and feel friendships that started laughing in the rain, and were cemented on that dance floor.

There’s one more thing I haven’t told you, which is that during the party we let everyone know that in two weeks, Gaby and I would be leaving Florence for Liguria.

It wasn’t a forever goodbye. But it was a goodbye for now, and everyone in that room understood exactly what that meant. It changed the texture of the night, I think, in the best possible way. We weren’t taking a single moment for granted. Every hug landed a little deeper. Every conversation felt a little fuller. It wasn’t a sad night – it was an enormously grateful one. Thankful for the people who had made our lives feel whole. Thankful for this city that had held both of us for so long. Open-hearted toward whatever was coming next.

Two weeks later, we packed up the apartment, said goodbye to the city, and drove to Recco.

I had lived in Florence for twelve years. 

It was where I’d built my life, and where Gaby and I had found each other. We chose to end that chapter by formalizing it in the most Florentine way possible – married in the Palazzo Vecchio, walking the streets I knew by heart, eating where we’d always eaten, watching the sunset from the overlook we’d watched it set from a hundred times before, dancing in the building we’d slept in the night before. It was a wedding, but it was also a long, slow, joyful goodbye.

A few weeks later we started a new chapter near the sea, with the goal of starting a family. Florence had been my home for over a decade. It still is, in the way that places like that always are.

There’s a photo from that morning – me leaning in to hold Gaby’s umbrella over her, thinking I was out of the frame, both of us laughing in the rain – that we keep coming back to. Two people in love, supporting each other on the most important morning of their lives, caught in a fleeting in-between moment by friends who knew how to see it.

The most planned-to-the-minute day of my life, and my favorite photo from it is the unplanned one.

A Heartfelt Thank You

These wonderful people helped make our wedding day truly magical