See This Breathtaking Italian Wedding in an 800-Year-Old Olive Grove

All Photography by Anna Ambrosi

Though mutual friends tried their best to set them up, it took several years for Alexis and Dylan to finally meet. “The timing was such that we were never available in the same moment, and meeting became a running joke,” Alexis tells Yahoo Style. After a few years, the pair randomly ran into each other at a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and they soon become an item.

After two years together Dylan proposed. “On a Wednesday morning at home, just before I was going to work and Dylan was about to board a plane to Barcelona,” Alexis remembers, “he leaned over and asked if I would marry him.”

The groom-to-be gave his future bride an aquamarine solitaire engagement ring from the New York designer Zoe. “I sent a photo to my mom after Dylan and I had chosen it and she called me almost speechless,” Alexis shares. “We learned that my grandmother, who I never met, had always worn an aquamarine ring. I was very moved by that because the ring was so different than anything I thought I’d ever wanted, and yet I was totally drawn to it.”

After announcing their engagement, the couple decided to have a destination wedding and offered up several suggestions to their family and friends, including places they had traveled to together and loved, such as New Mexico and Northern California, but Italy was the unanimous winner. “We’d spent two weeks in Puglia the summer after we got engaged,” explains Alexis. “We loved everything about our time there — the land, the food, the people. We couldn’t have been more thrilled.”

The pair visited several places in Puglia and decided on Masseria Mozzone for their wedding. The centuries-old farm is home to an olive grove and offered acres of land that could be used for both a wedding ceremony and reception. “It didn’t feel like it was built to be a wedding venue; it felt like someone’s home, and it was,” Alexis says. “We spent a week with Fiorella and her family, who own and live at Mozzone, and they were as much a part of the wedding as anyone.”

Since Alexis and Dylan live in Brooklyn, they hired the team at Marriage &  Glamour, based in Bari, Italy, to execute their vision: an intimate wedding steeped in local culture. “We love the region and wanted something that felt very true to the land and culture. That dictated where we had our ceremony (the olive grove), our accommodations (the masseria), our menu (traditional foods), our music (pizzica) and our favors (pumi),” Alexis explains.

The couple wed in an 800-year-old olive grove, which served as a natural cathedral.  A handful of chairs were placed in front of a green and white floral arbor, and a few scattered white flower petals edged the aisle. “We were surrounded by such an incredible natural environment that we didn’t want to distract from it with too much additional embellishment,” she says.

After the vows, the intimate party of 50 dined at one banquet table, decorated with a long chain of olive leaves accented with Eucalyptus and white flowers. The reception menu reflected the late spring/early summer season and included a cheese-making station serving fresh Stracciatella di bufala and burratine along with other cheeses and charcuterie. An array of seafood, fresh and fried breads, meats, vegetables — many of which were grown on site — and a dessert table filled with ricotta cheesecake, almond cookies, and other sweets. “It was gratuitous and unfathomably delicious,” Alexis adds. “Absolutely no one left hungry.”

The party continued into the night.  While a traditional pizzica band played throughout the ceremony and dinner, a DJ kicked off dancing with the couple’s first dance to Leon Bridge’s “Coming Home,” followed by a lot of classic ‘90s hip hop. “My favorite moment took place at the start of the night,” Alexis remembers. “All of my girlfriends took to the floor, the lights came down, the music came on and it was DJ Snake and Lil’ Jon’s “Turn Down for What,” performed with incredible energy and improvised dance moves. There was no question that the party had started.”

The wedding was exactly what the couple had envisioned: an intimate celebration at one of their favorite destinations. “It didn’t hit me until I was actually standing in the masseria courtyard in Puglia in my wedding dress, that this was exactly what everyone told me it would be: the most amazing experience and best day of my life,” Alexis says. “There I was, surrounded by everyone that has ever mattered most to me in life, and meeting everyone that has ever mattered most to the now most important person in my life, my husband. It seems like such a simple thing to overlook but I had until that moment.”

To brides-to-be, Alexis says: “All I can say is, enjoy it. It’s once in a lifetime and it can’t be beat.”

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