My name is Andrea Zengarini. I plan and direct destination weddings in Italy for international couples — and I came to this work through a path that most wedding planners have not travelled.

I began in professional catering. First as a waiter, then as a maître d’, then as general manager across several catering operations. Over those years I was present at more than a thousand weddings — not as the person who designed them, but as the person responsible for the room. For the service. For the moment a guest felt attended to or overlooked. For the difference between a dinner that breathed and one that rushed.

That experience never leaves you. It becomes the way you see.

When I moved into wedding planning, I brought with me something that cannot be taught in a course or learned from a mood board — a precise, instinctive understanding of what a celebration feels like from the inside. Not from behind a desk. From the floor.

Over more than a decade of directing destination weddings across Italy, I have worked with couples from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, New Zealand and beyond. Each of them arrived with a vision. My job was to protect that vision — from poor logistics, from decisions that seemed right but carried hidden costs, from the kind of improvisation that should never be necessary if the groundwork has been laid properly.

I work with a small number of couples each year, by choice. Because the work I do — building a three-day experience in which every guest feels genuinely cared for, from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave — requires full attention. To the season. To the menu. To the arc of the sun on a specific date. To the hundred details that never appear in the photographs but determine how the evening will be remembered.

I love beautiful things. I choose photographers whose work is extraordinary. I follow the trends and I understand design. But I have learned over the years that what stays with people — long after the photographs have been seen and shared — is how the evening felt. Whether it moved with grace. Whether nothing was left to chance.

That is what I have spent 35 years learning to build.