Marielle and Nick | Palazzo Confalone elopement

There is a ceramic tile on the outer wall of Palazzo Confalone, down near knee height where most people do not look. A black dog on white ceramic, teeth showing, with the Latin words “Cave Canem” underneath. Beware of the dog. It is a reproduction of the Pompeii mosaic, set into the red plaster of a late 13th-century palazzo on a cliff in Ravello. I have photographed at this building dozens of times, and I still like that tile. It tells you something about the place: old enough to reference the ancient world, irreverent enough to put a joke by the door.

Marielle and Nick did not know about the tile when they booked their elopement for two at Palazzo Confalone. They found it during portraits, and Marielle laughed and said it reminded her of their dog back in Winnipeg. We shot them kissing above it: black suit, white dress, deep red wall, the dog watching from below. The terracotta roof tiles cut a line across the blue sky behind them. Four colors, no filter, no editing trick. The wall did the work.

They had been together six years before they decided on Ravello, most of it spent talking, half-jokingly, about eloping somewhere neither of them had ever been. Winnipeg winters do that to a couple: they make a cliffside terrace in southern Italy feel less like an indulgence and more like an argument that wins itself. When Marielle finally said “let’s just do it, just the two of us,” Nick’s only condition was that somebody competent had to be there to take the pictures, because neither of them trusted a phone on a tripod to capture something they’d actually want to look at in twenty years. That’s a fairly common reason couples end up eloping with a photographer rather than eloping alone entirely: the day still needs a witness, even if it isn’t a legal one.

Through the Columns

An elopement for two at Palazzo Confalone in Ravello does not need a timeline. Marielle and Nick arrived in the late morning without one. No coordinator, no hair and makeup team waiting in the lobby, no sequence of events printed on card stock. Marielle got ready in the suite upstairs while Nick waited in the main hall. When she came down, he was standing between the Romanesque columns at the far end of the atrium, looking at the garden through the arches.

I stepped behind him and to the right, framing through the stone capitals on a 135mm at f/2. Marielle appeared at the top of the staircase holding her bouquet, white roses and baby’s breath against her white dress, and the carved column in the foreground dissolved into a warm blur while her face stayed sharp across the hall. Nick was in the right edge of the frame, his shoulder and the back of his head a dark shape without detail. The image works because the columns split the space in two: Marielle is framed by the arches like a figure in a painting, and Nick’s blurred silhouette tells you someone is watching her before you see who. Nobody told him to stand there. He had walked to the arches on his own, looking at the garden, and when Marielle came down the stairs I just had to press the shutter. Seven frames. The third one was the one.

Before any of that, we spent a few minutes in a sitting room I don’t often use with couples: worn stone columns holding up a low ceiling, a pair of dusty blue armchairs, a small oil painting of nothing in particular, and a terracotta jug sitting on a stone ledge like it had been there since before the building had a name. Marielle and Nick stood close together near the columns, not really posing, just talking while I circled them with a 50mm. It is the kind of room a couple would walk past without a second glance on a hotel tour, and it produced some of the most relaxed frames of the whole day precisely because nobody was thinking about the camera in it.

PORTFOLIO

The Elopement Vows at Palazzo Confalone

They had no officiant. No celebrant, no symbolic ceremony leader, no friend ordained online the week before. Marielle and Nick stood on the terrace with the coast below them and read vows they had written on folded pieces of paper pulled from their pockets. Two people talking to each other on a stone floor, the sea behind them, a pine tree throwing dappled shade across the tiles. I was fifteen meters away with a telephoto, sitting on a low wall at the edge of the terrace. I could not hear what they were saying. I did not need to. From that distance, the body language carries everything: the way she held the paper with both hands, the way he kept his eyes on her face and not on the view, the moment she stopped reading and said something that was not on the page. He put his forehead against hers. I pressed the shutter twice. Then they stood there for a while, not moving, not performing, just standing together with the valley of Scala stretching out behind them in green terraces and scattered white houses.

Right after, before either of them had really processed what had just happened, Marielle rested her chin near Nick’s shoulder and reached her hand up to his collar, the sea a flat grey-blue wash behind them, her engagement ring catching a small point of light against the dark fabric of his jacket. I shot it from behind them both, close, no faces visible at all. Sometimes the strongest image from a vow exchange isn’t the couple looking at each other. It’s the couple no longer needing to. A self-officiated elopement in Ravello is not legally binding in Italy. If you want it to be legal, you need a civil ceremony at the Town Hall or a religious ceremony in a church. Marielle and Nick knew this. They had already signed their legal papers in Canada. What happened on the terrace was for them, and the fact that no one was running the show gave the moment a quality that scheduled ceremonies rarely have. There was no cue, no “you may now kiss,” no sequence to follow. They kissed when they felt like it. They stopped talking when the words ran out. It lasted maybe four minutes.

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Across the Street

After the vows we spent an hour working through the building. On the mezzanine, I positioned Marielle and Nick inside the blue-painted doorway with the trailing pothos hanging from the railing below them. The white walls on either side created negative space around the frame, and the doorway itself acted as a border that contained the couple without closing them in. Marielle looked straight at the lens while Nick looked down at her. The bar behind them was out of focus, the warm tones of the bottles and the gold wall decoration adding color depth without pulling attention. I shot it from one floor below, angled up, which made the trailing plants fill the bottom third of the frame and gave the image a vertical tension that a flat, eye-level portrait would not have had.

We moved through the ground floor, the garden with its lemon trees and the wrought-iron railing along the cliff. I kept the pace up because the light shifts fast once the sun clears the ridge above and the terrace loses its even quality. At one point I asked Marielle to stand alone for a minute near a flowering shrub thick with pink and orange blooms, an old stone wall with a rounded terracotta doorway blurred behind her. She wasn’t smiling for the camera in that one, just looking down at her bouquet, and it is the portrait her mother asked to have printed and framed before she’d even seen the rest of the gallery.

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Palazzo Avino Portraits

Then I asked if they wanted to walk across to Palazzo Avino. It is a two-minute walk from Confalone, same street, and I know the management well enough to bring couples through the lobby for portraits when the space is available. Marielle and Nick said yes without hesitating.

The contrast between the two buildings is what makes the detour worth it. Confalone is medieval, warm-toned, intimate in scale, with terracotta and red plaster and stone columns worn smooth by centuries. Avino is white, bright, high-ceilinged, with bronze statues holding ornate candelabras and a checkerboard marble floor in green and cream. The late sun was coming through the open arches of the entrance hall and wrapping around the couple from behind, rimming their outlines in gold while the statues and columns filled the foreground with vertical lines and texture. The images from Avino look like they belong to a different day, a different palette, a different couple. That range in a single gallery is what makes a Ravello elopement gallery hold together when the couple sits down to choose their prints: variety of background, consistency of emotion.

Nick, who works in a field that has nothing to do with architecture or design, kept stopping to look up at the ceilings in the Avino lobby, at the join between one arch and the next, the way a person looks at something they don’t have a vocabulary for but recognize as well made anyway. Marielle noticed him doing it and started photographing him doing it on her phone, which is its own small document of the day that exists nowhere in my gallery and everywhere in hers.

The Cafe Table

We walked back to the Confalone terrace as the direct light was dropping behind Monte Cerreto. Marielle and Nick sat at one of the small iron cafe tables under the pine tree, facing each other, the hillside of Scala soft and green behind the railing. I shot it wide, including the empty chairs and the terracotta pots and the flag on the palazzo wall. They were not posing. They were talking about dinner. The image looks like two people at a cafe on a Tuesday afternoon who happen to be wearing a wedding dress and a tuxedo. That is the frame I would print if I had to choose one, because it shows what their elopement actually was: a private day in a beautiful place, with no audience and no agenda, just two people who flew across the Atlantic to sit on a terrace and promise each other something.

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I enjoy preserving emotions within breathtaking settings illuminated by warm lights in enchanting locations across Italy and beyond. I take pride in creating memories shaped by my vision, my approach to work, and certainly my emotional insight.

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We stopped whenever we saw good light. I look for the perfect angle. I want the light to flatter the subject. We avoided the busy main square. We found quiet corners instead.

We stayed at that table long enough for the waiter to come out twice, first to ask if they wanted anything, and the second time, after clocking the dress and the tuxedo, to bring out two glasses of prosecco on the house without being asked. Marielle told him what had just happened on the terrace above, and he disappeared for a minute and came back with a small plate of taralli, the local snack, “for the bride,” he said, before going back inside like it was nothing. Small, unscripted moments like that one do not show up in a shot list, but they are usually the ones a couple remembers most clearly a year later, more clearly sometimes than the vows themselves.

Planning an Elopement for Two at Palazzo Confalone

Marielle and Nick’s day is the simplest format I offer in Ravello, and it is also the one that couples ask about most often, set against the fuller range of formats in our wedding in Ravello guide. Here is how it works.

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An elopement for two at Palazzo Confalone requires three things: the venue, a celebrant (if you want a ceremony rather than a portrait session), and a photographer. No planner is strictly necessary for an event this size, because there is nothing to coordinate beyond the three of you arriving at the same place at the same time. I handle the timeline, the lighting, and the locations. The celebrant handles the ceremony. The Palazzo staff handles the room and the terrace.

The costs are lower than at any other established venue in Ravello. The Confalone does not require a buyout for elopements. You pay for the ceremony space, your room, and dinner if you choose to eat at the palazzo. A celebrant for a symbolic ceremony costs 400 to 800 euros. Flowers for an elopement are minimal: a bouquet and a small arrangement, typically 300 to 500 euros. My photography for an elopement session covers the ceremony and two hours of portraits, which is enough time to work through the pergola, the hall, the garden, and a detour to Palazzo Avino or the Princess Gardens if the light is right.

The best months are May, June, September, and October. July and August are hot, and the terrace in full sun at 2 PM will have you squinting in every frame. I schedule elopements for the mid-afternoon, starting around 3 PM in summer or 2 PM in shoulder season, so the ceremony happens when the vine pergola is filtering the sunlight and the portraits catch the golden hour that follows. If you want to add dinner on the terrace, the kitchen at Palazzo Confalone serves traditional Campanian food at per-person prices that are well below the five-star hotels. The terracotta terrace at sunset, with a table for two and the coast lit up below, is the kind of dinner scene that makes the gallery complete.

A self-officiated ceremony like Marielle and Nick’s is not legally binding in Italy. If you want your elopement to be legal, add a civil ceremony at the Ravello Town Hall on a different morning, sign the papers with two witnesses, and keep the Confalone ceremony as the emotional event. Most of my elopement couples handle the legal paperwork in their home country before traveling and use the Palazzo ceremony as their personal celebration, exactly as Marielle and Nick did with their Canadian paperwork before they ever booked flights to Naples.

My perspective is heartfelt, much like myself. I aim to capture fragments of character within stunning scenes. In a way, this reveals a piece of my identity and personal journey.

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One question I get often from couples considering this exact format: is it strange to have a photographer present for a ceremony with no other witnesses at all? In practice, no. I position myself far enough away that the couple forgets I’m there within the first few minutes, and I never insert myself into the moment itself, no directing the vows, no asking them to repeat a line for a better angle. My job on a day like this is closer to documentary work than event photography. I am there to notice things, not to stage them. Marielle told me afterward that she’d forgotten I was even on the terrace by the time she got to the second page of her vows, which is about the best review a photographer working this kind of elopement can hope for.

Costs, ceremony options, and what makes the Confalone different from the larger hotels are on the Palazzo Confalone venue page.

Marielle and Nick flew home to Winnipeg two days later, jet-lagged and slightly sunburned, with a phone full of their own photos and, a few weeks after that, a gallery from me that neither of them expected to affect them the way it did. Marielle told me later that she cried the first time she opened it, not because anything in it was sad, but because it was the first time she’d seen the day from the outside, the way someone else had experienced watching them. That is, in the end, the entire argument for hiring a photographer even when nobody else is invited: somebody has to be the one who was actually there, watching, when the two of you were busy just living it. And if this is close to the day you have in mind, send me your dates.