Fourteen people, one candlelit garden at Villa Medicea di Lilliano outside Florence, and a fairytale brief taken completely straight: soft pink and white florals, crystal chandeliers hung in the open air, and a level of intention worked out down to the glassware. The florals came from Elena Mencarelli of Elena M. Floral Design, who built arrangements that look earthed to the spot rather than placed on it, spilled them across a moon shaped ceremony plan, and sent them climbing the chandelier posts at dinner. Gianni Aiazzi caught the whole thing in an editorial register that swings between warm garden color and stark black and white.
The origin story is almost too on the nose for a magazine. Eighteen years ago Rania was working at a café and John was the morning regular, and she served him coffee for months before he finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. They dated young, then life split them up, and the reunion years later is the part they both read as fate rather than coincidence. What followed was roughly a decade of traveling the world together before anyone said the word engaged.
The proposal landed in the spring of 2024, on a trip to Japan, where John picked a picnic spot at Lake Kawaguchi beneath Mount Fuji and got down on one knee. For the wedding itself, Rania planned everything herself over a year and a half, and the brief never wavered: pull the fairytale they had been living into every table, every flower, every candle. What that became is a bride in a gown named after a fictional heroine, a dog written in as best man, and a dinner the couple describes as the moment everything stood still.
Bride
Rania wore the Katniss gown by WONÁ Concept, and the name is not an accident. It nods to Katniss Everdeen, and WONÁ‘s own copy leans into the fantasy novel heroine idea, so a bride who described her own planning as a Cinderella state of mind walked the aisle in a gown named for a different fictional heroine entirely.
WONÁ, whose name translates to she in Ukrainian, is the fashion forward sister label to Eva Lendel, and the Katniss is peak WONÁ: sheer embroidered tulle, 3D floral lace crawling up an exposed corset that laces at the back, off the shoulder sleeves, and a cathedral train that turns a staircase into a runway.
For scent she chose Jo Malone London Wood Sage & Sea Salt, a cool saline fragrance built around a windswept British coastline. The shoes were the high low flex that reads current: embellished, embroidered wedding heels from Zara under a designer gown. Makeup and hair were done by Rania’s childhood best friend.
John kept his side simpler and just as loaded. His suit came from Indochino, and the meaning lived in what he carried rather than the cut: an orchid boutonniere by Elena Mencarelli, the same flower he first gave Rania when they met, a portrait of his late mother and father tucked in his pocket reading your love guides me, and an embroidered handkerchief of Diesel standing in as best man from afar.
Ceremony
The ceremony took place at the fountain, and rather than build an arch the couple used the villa’s own carved stone wall, crowned with urns, as the backdrop. The fourteen guests sat in a semicircle that curved around Rania and John instead of facing them in rows, a small structural choice that did a lot of emotional work, since it put family and friends physically around the couple rather than lined up in front of them.
Elena Mencarelli handled the florals so they read as if they were growing straight up out of the soil rather than set down on it, soft pink and white pushing against the garden’s green and framing the aisle at ground level. Jo Bertolino of Tuscan Pledges officiated, and by the end the whole semicircle was crying, which tracks, given the couple had stripped the setting back to nothing but the people.
Rania’s bouquet came from Elena Mencarelli as well, and clipped to it was the collar tag of Diesel, the couple’s dog, who could not travel to Italy and got written into the day anyway. It is the kind of private detail nobody would notice unless they were told, carried down the aisle on purpose.
Reception
Dinner was the whole point for Rania and John, and it happened in the garden at Villa Medicea di Lilliano as the sun dropped over the Chianti hills, lemon trees on every side. Everyone, all fourteen of them, sat at one long candlelit table, which is the seating version of the moon shaped ceremony: nobody at a far table, nobody at the edge of the night. Kaleydo‘s chandeliers hung directly over the setting with Elena Mencarelli‘s florals wrapped up the posts, so the flowers looked like they were climbing the light.
The table itself is where the detail obsession shows. A botanical print cloth that reads like a toile ran the length of it, and Rania picked every glass specifically to cut against that print, the flowers, and the chandeliers rather than blend in, a level of intention most people never clock. Chairs and plateware came from Preludio, the linen from Tablecloth Rental, and the wine was Malenchini, poured straight from the estate, since the family that has owned Villa Medicea di Lilliano since the 1830s makes its own organic label on site.
Their first dance was the acoustic version of Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, their song, taken at the top of the staircase that looks down over the hills and the table below. Rania closed the night with the final speech herself, aimed at what every guest in that curve of chairs had meant to the two of them.
Sara Peron‘s live painting was finished by the end of the evening, and she went further, painting individual portraits for guests and for the vendors who built the day, the photographer and florist included, so the people who usually stay behind the scenes went home with art too. Gianni Aiazzi caught all of it, which is the reason any of these details survive past the night they happened.
FLORAL DESIGN Elena Mencarelli | PHOTOGRAPHER Gianni Aiazzi | VENUE Villa Medicea di Lilliano | OFFICIANT Tuscan Pledges | DRESS Wona Bridal | CATERING Goodies | CHANDELIERS Kaleydo | CHAIRS & PLATEWARE Preludio | LINENS Tablecloth Rental | LIVE PAINTER Sara Peron
