Alix and Ben spent a year and a half building a beautiful wedding in Puglia. The couple handed the whole thing to planner Roberta Cavaliere, whose stated philosophy puts experience ahead of design and treats etiquette as optional, and that thinking shows up in every decision. What her team pulled together across three days at a 17th century masseria near Fasano reads more like a group trip that happened to end in vows. The florals stayed loose, the palette stayed pale, and the landscape did most of the talking. That is the version of an Italian wedding worth clocking right now.
Location: Puglia, Italy
Style: Whimsical, Romantic, Joyful
Time of planning: 1.5 year
Number of guests: 60
Setting: Masseria and Beach Club
Season: Fall
The origin story runs through a group chat’s worth of near misses. A mutual friend, Alix’s college roommate and Ben’s coworker at Google, passed Alix’s number to Ben, who then sat on it for seven months before reaching out. That same friend ended up officiating the wedding. The first attempt lasted a few months. Ben resurfaced on New Year’s Eve 2019 to say he had been thinking about her, Alix moved to Chelsea to be closer, and then the pandemic rewrote the plot about seven months in, when the two agreed that seeing other people might be the long way back to each other.
They kept it warm in the meantime, the occasional coffee, a bottle of Ruinart when Ben bought his place in Dumbo, a chance encounter at the birthday party of the friend who started all of it. When they reconnected in August 2022, both freshly single, the third first date came with a thesis statement: if they were doing this again, they both already knew where it was headed. A year later Alix moved into the Dumbo apartment. Six months after that, on Friday, April 12, the sun broke through a rainy morning and Ben got down on one knee on the Brooklyn Heights promenade with the line, “delivery sushi might be tough tonight.” Their wedding film was captured by Jory Films.
Pizza Night
The weekend actually opened on September 18, with a pizza party under the olive trees by the pool at Masseria Calderisi. This was the loud, saturated counterpart to the wedding day’s pale restraint: exotic fruit piled beside flowers, tablecloths in real color, chairs styled to clash on purpose.
Cut papaya and citrus stacked into the centerpieces read like a Dutch still life that decided to loosen up, which tracks, because fruit heavy tables were the big 2024 move and this was the grown up version of it. Alix wore Cult Gaia and Ben wore Brunello Cucinelli, both dressed for a holiday rather than a formal dinner. A roaming folk band worked the crowd with tambourines, the folk tradition that belongs to this stretch of southern Italy, and the dancing started well before dessert.
Cooking Class
On the day two the group detoured to da Silvé, the local restaurant Alix and Ben had been quietly returning to for years, for a cooking class that doubled as a reunion. The people walking everyone through the recipes were not hired performers, they were locals the couple had befriended on past trips, which is the difference between renting a culture and being welcomed into one. The class melted into a long lunch built entirely from the dishes the guests had just made. This is where the experience over design idea stops being a tagline and starts being lunch.
Welcome Dinner
Then the day two moved to the water at Calderisi Mare, the masseria’s private beach club on the Adriatic, for a BBQ that took the word literally and then dressed it up. Alix wore Elie Saab to a grill lunch, which is the kind of high low move that only works when nobody involved is taking themselves too seriously, and Ben kept it loose in Brunello Cucinelli.
The soundtrack came from an all female trio running DJ, saxophone, and vocals at once, a setup that reads more Ibiza sunset than wedding playlist. Green and white striped plates and a hand illustrated menu titled Live From The Grill kept the whole thing tethered to the sea without tipping into nautical cliché.
Bride's Fashion
Alix started the morning in the getting ready uniform of the moment, the whole bridal party in matching pale blue pajama sets. The stationery ran through two hands, Embellishing the Ordinary and Maple and Rae, carrying the invitation language all the way to the custom print that turned up later on the reception tables.
For the ceremony she wore the Versailles gown from Monique Lhuillier‘s Platinum Collection, a dimensional floral piece that answers the current appetite for texture over flat lace, and put Manolo Blahnik on her feet. Beauty Livery handled hair and makeup and read the assignment correctly: a fresh, lit from within face and hair left deliberately soft.
For the after party she switched into Nadine Merabi, the label built for exactly this kind of dance until the fireworks moment, and finished the look with Christian Louboutin.
Groom’s Fashion
Ben went with a Zegna tuxedo, which is the correct amount of Italian tailoring to wear while getting married in Italy, and Christian Louboutin shoes, the red soles doing quiet work. His accessories got the flat lay treatment that used to be reserved for the bride, a sign of where menswear attention is heading. The groomsmen portrait is the sleeper hit of the whole gallery: a row of black tuxes and sunglasses against a rust red door.
First Look
The first look happened in the masseria’s blue doorways, the one saturated color the estate allows itself against all that whitewash. The reveal is the modern couple’s way of buying a private minute before the day belongs to everyone else, and this one clearly delivered on the assignment.
Ceremony
The ceremony sat under a chuppah in a grove of olive trees old enough to have watched a few centuries go by, on the grounds of Masseria Calderisi. Alix and Ben chose a Jewish laic celebration, secular in structure but rooted in heritage, which let them honor where they come from while skipping the parts of a formal service that never felt like them. The florals from Flower Addicted stayed loose and wild, less arranged than gathered, which is the register this whole wedding operated in.
The detail that turns the ceremony from lovely into unrepeatable is who was standing at the front. The officiant was the same friend who had handed Ben the phone number in the first place, the person without whom none of this exists. Watching the matchmaker close her own loop out loud, in front of everyone, is the kind of narrative payoff you cannot manufacture. Guests felt it, and plenty of them did not make it through dry eyed.
Then there were the donkeys. The masseria’s resident donkeys started neighing right in the middle of the vows, the sort of thing you cannot plan and would never want to edit out, and it became one of the moments everyone kept bringing up afterward. That is Puglia refusing to be staged. The cathedral veil against a gravel aisle and a working farm says everything about the tone: formal enough to mean it, relaxed enough to enjoy it.
Moments Together
The couple portraits are where Queen of Romance earns the byline. Charis, the photographer behind the studio, trained on the runways of Milan and Paris before moving into weddings, and that fashion literacy shows in how she lights a gown and lets a silhouette carry a frame. Cocktail hour ran on the same easy energy the whole weekend had been building, guests drifting through the courtyard with a drink while the light did its thing.
"We had the absolute best planner, Roberta Cavaliere! She and her team were so incredible, organized, prepared, and creative! Planning from so far away can be a challenge and they made it so simple!"
Reception
The reception moved into the masseria’s main courtyard, where the design language from the ceremony just kept going: loose organic florals, layers of greenery, and a pale green and yellow palette that looked like it grew out of the ground rather than getting trucked in. The design was led by Roberta Cavaliere with Steven Fadda, and the discipline of it is the point. Everything stayed in the same restrained key from the aisle to the last dance.
The tablecloth deserves its own paragraph. It was fully bespoke, a custom pattern designed for Alix and Ben and printed for this one night, which is a flex that photographs quietly and costs seriously. Set against scalloped cordless lamps, the single most requested object in wedding decor right now, plus wishbone chairs, pink tinted glass, and green ribbon at each napkin, the tables landed in that grandmillennial zone where your grandmother’s linen sensibility meets a design object.
Music did the heavy lifting. Three live performers eased the room in as guests took their seats, then handed off to a full live band from Assya Live Music that ran the celebration deep into the Puglian night. The couple’s verdict on that band was not measured, and after watching the dance floor, it is hard to argue with them.
The finale was literal fireworks. As Alix and Ben cut the cake, the sky over the masseria went off, which is the confident way to close a night. And in the truest detail of the entire weekend, the late night snack was not a slider or a taco. It was a giant wheel of parmesan.
Their one piece of advice, earned across eighteen months of planning a wedding from an ocean away: “Plan thoroughly, communicate openly, and trust the process. The rest will take care of itself!“
Advice from the couple:
• Ask every single question, no matter how small, no matter how obvious it might have seemed. Planning a wedding in a foreign country, with limited ability to visit in person, requires a level of trust and thoroughness that you simply cannot afford to skip.
• We would also strongly encourage any couple to establish clear communication rhythms with their planning team from the very beginning. It gave us structure, reassurance, and the feeling of always being in good hands, even from thousands of miles away. That consistency was everything.
• Finally, don’t underestimate the power of keeping your guests informed. Sending thoughtful and detailed “know before you go” communications meant that everyone arrived prepared, relaxed, and ready to celebrate. When your guests feel taken care of, the energy of the entire weekend shifts, and that is something you feel from the very first moment everyone is together.
WEDDING PLANNER Roberta Cavaliere | WEDDING DESIGN Steven Fadda | PHOTOGRAPHER Queen of Romance | VIDEOGRAPHER Jory Films | VENUES Masseria Calderisi, Calderisi Mare, da Silvé | FLORALS Flower Addicted | STATIONERY Embellishing the Ordinary, Maple and Rae | HAIR & MAKEUP Beauty Livery | BRIDE’S GOWN Monique Lhuillier | BRIDE’S CEREMONY SHOES Manolo Blahnik | BRIDE’S AFTER PARTY DRESS Nadine Merabi | BRIDE’S AFTER PARTY SHOES Christian Louboutin | BRIDE’S WELCOME DINNER LOOK Cult Gaia | BRIDE’S BEACH BBQ LOOK Elie Saab | GROOM’S TUXEDO Zegna | GROOM’S SHOES Christian Louboutin | GROOM’S WELCOME & BBQ LOOKS Brunello Cucinelli | MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT Assya Live Music | AV SERVICE Melody Service
