Why we can't show you a real Tuscany wedding budget

This page used to carry a line-by-line budget from what it described as a real mid-range Tuscany wedding for 70 guests in September: venue hire, a welcome dinner, a farewell brunch, the bridal bouquet at €180, petal confetti at €80. Every line had a figure. Every figure added up.

None of it was real. There was no couple, no borgo, no September wedding. The numbers were invented and then presented as a document — which is worse than an estimate, because an estimate admits what it is.

We have removed it. This page explains why no honest version exists, and what we can put here instead.

Why a real budget is almost impossible to publish

Three reasons, and the first is the one that matters most.

Couples do not publish their budgets, and suppliers cannot. What a venue charged one couple is commercially confidential and contractually so. A supplier who published a client's itemised invoice would not have many more clients.

The market itself does not publish prices. We checked twenty-six of the venues listed on this site. Not one publishes a wedding price. Nor does any caterer we list. The single published figure anyone gave was a €20 per person wine tasting. There is no rate card to compile a budget from.

And a single budget is not information. Even a genuine invoice from one wedding tells you about that wedding: that guest list, that date, that property, that year. Presented as a template it does the opposite of informing — it anchors you to a number that was never about you.

What an invented budget actually costs the reader

It reads as evidence. That is the whole problem with the page we took down.

A couple who read "€190 per person for the wedding dinner" did not treat it as a guess. They treated it as what people pay, and they went to their first supplier meeting with a figure in their head that came from nowhere. If the quote came in higher they felt overcharged. If it came in lower they felt they were getting something cheap. Both feelings were manufactured by us.

What is genuinely published

One set of wedding costs in Tuscany is public, official and checkable: what the comune charges to marry you. It is the only part of the bill you can know before you enquire, and it varies far more than most couples expect.

The same ten-minute civil ceremony costs €100 in Cortona and €5,100 in Florence. For a small wedding, where fixed costs are a large share of the total, choosing the town is a budget decision rather than a matter of taste.

Beyond that: a €16 revenue stamp before the nulla osta can be legalised at the Prefettura, €32 in stamp duty for banns in Cortona when one spouse lives elsewhere, and A$70 for an Australian consular declaration. Small, real, and routinely unbudgeted.

The one supplier price we could find

Among the 133 businesses listed on this site, exactly one publishes a figure: Marry Me in Tuscany, a planner in Siena, lists three packages with starting prices tied to guest numbers and venue type.

Read it carefully. The site does not say whether the figure covers the planner's fee alone or a whole wedding, and those are very different numbers. We mention it not because it settles anything, but because it is the only checkable supplier price we have found in the entire Tuscan market — which tells you something about the market.

What to do instead of copying a budget

Build your own, in this order.

1. Fix the guest number first. Everything else is downstream of it, and it is the only lever that works in both directions.
2. Split the lines into fixed and per-head. The comune fee, the photographer and the planner do not shrink with the guest list. Food, drink and transport do.
3. Get real quotes early, and normalise them before comparing: ask whether each includes IVA, what is inside the per-head figure, and when the contract ends.
4. Write the budget as a calendar, not a total. Deposits fall due on booking, often a year ahead and usually non-refundable.
5. Keep a contingency you intend to use. The wet-weather plan that costs extra, the overtime hour, the second trip.

Our budget guide sets this out properly, and the cost guide has the full sourced table of what is published.

Why we are telling you this

Because the page that used to be here is the kind of thing this site now exists to correct. We found invented descriptions of real businesses, invented sourcing, and invented prices across this website, and we have been removing them.

Leaving a blank space where the budget was would have been tidier. Saying what was there, and why it is gone, is more useful — and it tells you what to expect from the pages that remain.