Real Wedding: Amelia & Luca's Cliffside Elopement in Ravello, Amalfi Coast

Their Story

Amelia is a chef de partie at a restaurant in Cambridge that I will not name, partly because she asked me not to, and partly because she is the sort of person who would rather you came across her food by accident than by introduction. Luca is half-Italian — his mother grew up just outside Naples — and although he was raised in Hertfordshire, the Amalfi Coast has been the place his family returns to every August since he was four.

When the two of them began talking about a wedding, they came at it from opposite directions. Amelia wanted "no audience, no schedule." Luca wanted Ravello, because his grandmother — Nonna Carmela — grew up in a village half an hour down the coast and is now eighty-eight and would not be making any more trips on a plane. They worked out very quickly that those two wishes were not in fact in tension. They could elope, just the two of them, to the place his grandmother could still drive to.

The week was structured as deliberately as a kitchen service. They flew into Naples on the Monday, took the long coast road down to Ravello, and gave themselves three days to do nothing — to walk, to sleep, to eat lunches that went on until five. The wedding day itself was Thursday. Civil registration at Ravello Town Hall in the morning, with a translator, two witnesses borrowed politely from the registrar's office, and an exchange of papers that took longer than the vows.

The vows came later, on the Belvedere of Infinity at Villa Cimbrone. Luca's family fixer, Luca Russo (the name coincidence had embarrassed both of them for months), had arranged a private hour on the terrace at four o'clock — the moment the Amalfi sun stops being aggressive and starts being golden, the light that does most of the work in any photograph you have ever seen of this coast. They read their own vows. Amelia cried during her own — not Luca's — which she said afterwards was not what she had expected.

A lemon farmer on the path down from the villa, seeing the dress and recognising the situation, cut them two lemons and pressed them into Amelia's hands with the kind of unembarrassed gravity that older Italian men do better than anyone. Amelia kept the lemons on the bedside table at the villa for the rest of the week.

Dinner had been booked for two at Ristorante Da Salvatore Ravello — the small one, owned by the family who own the bigger one. Halfway through the antipasti, Nonna Carmela arrived, having been driven up the coast by Luca's cousin without telling either of them. She stayed for three courses and a glass of limoncello, told a story about Luca's grandfather that made Luca cry, and left at half past ten with a kiss for Amelia that I am told was the moment Amelia stopped feeling like a person who had married into a family and started feeling like a person who belonged in one.

That night, back at the villa, they swam in the small pool at midnight. The Tyrrhenian was just visible over the cliff wall in the dark, the stars the kind of stars you cannot really photograph honestly. I tried, badly. The photograph in the gallery is the only one that came out and it is mostly Luca laughing at me trying.

The week that followed was pasta-making lessons, a half-day boat to Capri, two long lunches on the terrace, and one nap that Amelia later described as "the best nap of my professional life." They came home married, sunburnt, three kilos heavier, and entirely sure they had done it correctly.