Your wedding day is one of the most special days of you and your partners lives. It should be a day filled with love and laughter and excitement; dancing, eating and toasting your love. It should be a day that is simply magical. Simona created just that for Ryan and myself. From the start, Simona was knowledgeable, incredibly well-connected, clear in her understanding of our vision; and she deeply cared about us. We felt special and we felt heard. There was no request that she wasn’t able to deliver to us. She remedied every matter and handled it with the utmost professionalism. She is family at this point! We spent the last year speaking with her more than some of our relatives…and I’m so glad we did because the end result was breathtaking. I cannot say enough good thing about Simona and what her skills meant to us. I wish everyone had a planner and supporter like Simona!!

Simona provided wedding planning, coordination, Italian-English translation and day-of orchestration for our most special day.

Our journey began (pretty late I might add, at only 4 months out) with us providing a requirement of a "simple local country" theme at a unrealistically too-low budget and left it to Simona's expertise to craft something we'd enjoy. Simona knows all the local vendors so she was able to list 2-3 great options for each category for us to evaluate and choose, each one with a rough price estimate. Once we discussed the ones we wanted, Simona helped us with the detailed decisions. We'd answer Simona's prompts, occasionally offer our requests as things come to us, but otherwise Simona and the vendors handled all the rest, presenting us with the plan for our approval.

One standout occasion made me understand Simona was doing this for our bliss more than any other motivation… We had come to Simona with the venue/villa chosen, having vacationed there previously. The only detail we offered Simona when discussing our vision was having the ceremony "at sunset in the little olive garden with the archway as a backdrop". At a point in the planning after much was settled, the villa host pointed out that since we were last there they began a landscaping redesign of the olive garden and it wouldn't be available for our wedding. We were devastated by this news but acquiesced and began working on an alternative ceremony location on the property. Despite that, later that week, Simona contacted us and let us know it was all sorted out and the original garden location would be available. I don't know what Simona had to do to make that happen, but the end result was our bliss.

When the special day arrived Simona's hard earned skills from high-stakes catering really shone through. It was so nice to see how calm and poised she was the whole time despite my understanding things were not quite going to plan. One of our photographers nick-named her "il Generale", presumably because she kept an iron grip on all the vendors, but I think like great military generals she also had contingencies for every possible crisis. It made me feel like she thrives in that hectic world. She is precisely the person you want coordinating on the big day to make sure everything ends up the right kind of perfect, even if it's not according to "plan". (Note, all the "issues" were caused by guests being late or having troubles, not Simona or the vendors.)

To avoid sounding like this is a fake review, I'll mention the only somewhat challenging part of working with Simona… Her English is quite effective, but can take a few tries to fully understand each other. The only time this posed any kind of problem was in the City council office. Apparently, it's not often that Americans go through the hurdles of the Italian bureaucracy to be married officially in the country and it's only the symbolic ceremony they are after. For us, Simona acted as the official translator as required by the bureaucracy. Simona's limitations on her English vocabulary came up then as she had to translate a lot of legal jargon into English. It took a very long time for her to get through reading what felt like 10 solid pages of text. Ultimately, what we took away from the experience was how ridiculous the Italian bureaucracy is. Simona did great, even though the Italian bureaucrat seemed to know the jargon better than she did and had to help her out with a few of the words. That said, we hired her mostly to speak with the Italians, so on that end of course she communicates perfectly.

Beyond platitudes, many of our guests rank that day as the best wedding they've been to. The passion and attention to detail of Simona and all the vendors she brought was not anything you could buy in the United States. Had we tried, I’m now confident it would have cost more for a similar quality wedding at home than the wedding and the whole 2 week trip to Italy for my whole family. Thank you Simona!

Simona takes care of us from the first moment with professionalism, involvement and flexibility. She offered us various estimates vendors (music, lights, animation, photography and flowers) in order to find the one that best met our needs. She understood us and was able to support us, making use of an excellent team of proven professionals. She collaborated excellently with the catering that we had already chosen. She was always punctual and present and made many vital suggestions to make everything work beautifully. She was very good at calibrating herself according to our requests: she solicited us without being pressing. The wedding and party went exactly as we wished. Everything was great!