Weddingbee Blog

When we started looking for a venue a whopping 15 months in advance, we had our pick: all the venues we contacted were still free for our September 2011 date. Mr. Caro and I took a one-week vacation to Italy and immediately started focusing on venues, as we wanted to finalize that before everything else.

Thanks to my internet research and my mom’s knowledge of the lake, we managed to visit a grand total of 30 locations in three days! Sound impossible? Well, the truth is we had a lot of requirements. So as soon as we’d realize that a venue did not meet one of the requirements, we’d leave and move on.

• Indoor option: It’s Italy, but it does rain there too! You wouldn’t believe how many locations did not have an adequate indoor option.
• View on the lake: Since most of our guests will be traveling to join us, we want them to enjoy as much beautiful scenery as possible.
• Intimacy: We’d like an intimate, cozy atmosphere. Many big resorts cannot offer that.
• Convenience: Needs to be close to hotels and on the eastern side of the lake.

Out of the 30 we had some pretty good contenders.

1: Locanda San Vigilio, 2: Casino di Caccia, 3: Locanda San Verolo, 4: Villa Feltrinelli, 5: Villa Giona, 6: Poggio degli Ulivi

Unfortunately, they all had a dealbreaker: too expensive, too far, not enough indoor space, not accessible enough…always something wrong. We were starting to worry that we’d have to revise our requirements when, at the end of the third day, we found it. Without further ado, here is the venue we chose: the Hotel Du Parc.

Source

We felt the place was right as soon as we got there: the villa was gorgeous but unpretentious, and we loved the garden. We got a great vibe from the restaurant manager, who was truly interested in our plans and seemed very excited to work with us to make our vision come true!

Cons: To be honest, there were a couple of things that were nagging at us about this choice. One was the indoor option, which was small and a bit plain. The other was that the hotel management is notorious on the lake for not investing in its properties and for trying to be as cheap as possible. (This is obvious when checking the online reviews of their hotels.)

But as everything else was perfect and since we felt the restaurant manager was great to work with, we decided to finalize the decision and move on.

If only we had listened to that nagging voice…