Wedding tourism is booming in Italy more than ever, with over 11,000 overseas couples tying the knot in the Bel Paese last year, according to the Destination Weddings in Italy Observatory, compiled by the Centro Studi Turistici tourist study center.
Not surprisingly given previous results, Tuscany was confirmed as favorite foreign wedding destination with 21% of the total, followed by Lombardy, Campania, Puglia, Sicily, and Lazio, the observatory said.
The survey predicts that the foreign wedding industry has even bigger “margins for expansion”.
Based on estimates on the length of stay of couples and guests at the ceremony (3.3 nights on average), 619 thousand arrivals and over 2 million tourist presences were linked to destination weddings in 2022 producing an estimated turnover of €599 million, about 11% more than the levels estimated in 2019.
The vogue for getting married in Italy has been boosted by celebrity couples choosing the country to get hitched, starting in 1992 with David Bowie and Somali born model Iman Abdulmajid, who swapped vows in the American Church of St James in Florence.
This was followed by Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes on Lake Bracciano, George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin at Palazzo Papadopol in Venice, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West at the Forte Belvedere in Florence, and Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel at Borgo Egnazia in Puglia, to name a few.
Discussion about this post