Wedding Reporter is me, Giancarlo Malandra. I’m an Italian photographer based in Giulianova, on the Adriatic coast, and I’ve been photographing weddings for fourteen years across Italy, most often in Abruzzo, Rome and on the Amalfi Coast.

Couples planning a wedding in Italy from abroad usually ask me about places before they ask about photographs: whether a hilltop village is worth the drive for the guests, what time the light is good on the terrace, whether the beach still works at the end of September, why two venues that look the same online feel so different in person. These are the questions that decide how your pictures will look, and they are the ones I know how to answer.

I learned it doing a different job. For twenty years I’ve photographed Abruzzo for books and magazines, going back to the same places in every season and at hours when nobody else would bother. That work became more than ten photography books published by De Siena Editore, years of articles for Tesori d’Abruzzo magazine, and commissions from public bodies in the region. Those years taught me what to look for and what to ask, wherever the wedding is: what the place looks like at the time you’ll actually be there, where the crowds gather, how long it really takes to get from the church to dinner.

Many of my couples come back to marry in the Italian town their family left, sometimes two or three generations ago. At those weddings the church, the square and the grandparents’ house matter as much as the people, so I make sure they stay in the pictures and can be recognized. Thirty years from now, those photographs are how you’ll remember the place.

Tell me where in Italy and when you’re getting married, and I’ll tell you what I know about that place, or what we need to find out before the day.