Anastasia and Joe | Palazzo Avino to Hotel Caruso wedding
A couple rooted in Texas and living in New York, who split their wedding day between two of Ravello’s most iconic hotels and walked through the cobblestone streets in between. Anastasia and Joe at Palazzo Avino and Hotel Caruso.
“Auguri!” An old woman leaned out of a second-floor window on Via San Giovanni del Toro and threw the word down at us like a handful of rice. Anastasia turned to find her and nearly lost her footing on the cobblestones. Joe caught her elbow without taking his eyes off her face. He had her bouquet of near-black calla lilies tucked under one arm, because she needed both hands to hold up her dress, and neither of them had noticed that I was still shooting. What was supposed to be a ten-minute walk between two hotels was already at forty minutes and showing no signs of slowing down.
That sentence probably needs some backstory. Anastasia and Joe live in New York now, but Texas is still the operating system underneath everything they do. When I asked what they wanted from their wedding day, Anastasia thought about it for exactly as long as it takes to answer a question she’d clearly already answered a hundred times in her head. “We want our people to eat until they can’t move, dance until their feet hurt, and cry at least once.” Fair enough. The fact that all of this was happening on a cliff above the Tyrrhenian Sea instead of a ranch outside Austin did not change the program one bit.
What made the day structurally unusual is that it happened across two hotels instead of one. The morning unfolded at Palazzo Avino, the ceremony and reception at the Belmond Hotel Caruso, and in between, the two of them walked the distance most couples cover by car. That walk is where I started this story, and it’s worth explaining why before going back to the beginning.
Morning at Palazzo Avino
Anastasia got ready in the Infinito Suite, a room with Moorish arched windows that look straight out over open water. Palazzo Avino has been nicknamed the Pink Palace for as long as anyone in Ravello can remember, and the name is accurate down to the last coat of paint. The exterior walls are a dusty, sun-faded rose, and when the midday light lands on them, the color bounces back into the room as a warm, peach-toned wash. It behaves like a reflector the size of a building. Skin tones under that light need almost no correction from me. I’ve photographed getting-ready mornings in most of the hotels along this coast, and the rooms at the Avino remain some of the most forgiving I’ve worked in, precisely because the building itself is doing half the lighting job before I even open my camera bag.
Out on the terrace past the suite, a stone balustrade runs the length of the building with a single palm in a huge terracotta urn standing guard at one corner, the mountains rising behind it and the coastline dropping away below. It’s the kind of view that makes people go quiet for a second before they remember to keep talking. Anastasia stood there in her robe that morning with her coffee going cold in her hand, just looking, and I let her have the thirty seconds before I asked for a single frame.
Two First Looks, Not One
Most weddings I shoot have one first look. This one had two, and they could not have looked more different from each other.
Framing feelings
EMILIANO RUSSO
Ravello stands out as one of Italy’s most magical places to celebrate a wedding.
HIDDEN JEMS
We are familiar with secret spots in Ravello and your romance merits the finest.
RAVELLO IS YOURS
Experience an elegant wedding alongside an unforgettable adventure along the Amalfi Coast.
The first was with her father. It was approaching noon, the sun directly overhead and unforgiving, and the terrace was a contrast problem waiting to happen: bright white stone above, hard shadow below. I positioned him just inside the shade of a doorway, deep enough to block the direct sun but close enough that reflected light off the sea and the pink walls still reached his face. Anastasia walked out behind him in her dress and tapped his shoulder. He turned, saw her, and his whole face rearranged itself in about half a second, disbelief first, then something closer to relief. He was wearing a cream cowboy hat that he did not take off for the rest of the day, and I don’t think anyone asked him to. I shot the reveal with a long lens to compress the background into a soft wash of blue, the archway framing them from above like it had been built for this exact purpose. It hadn’t. It just happened to work.
The second first look was with Joe, later, and it happened on the balustrade itself rather than in the doorway. I walked them out separately and had him wait at the corner where the pink flowering shrubs were thickest, the mountains stacked up hazy behind him. Anastasia came around the palm tree and he turned before she’d even said anything. There was less shock in this one and more recognition, the look of two people confirming something they already knew was true. The pink blossoms in the foreground did something I couldn’t have arranged with a stylist: they framed the bottom third of the image in soft color without ever pulling focus from their faces. It’s one of my favorite frames from the whole day, and it very nearly didn’t happen, because the schedule that morning had almost no room left for it.
The Groomsmen
Joe got ready in a separate wing with darker wood paneling and heavier furniture, a room that swallows light instead of bouncing it. I closed the drapes most of the way and let a single shaft fall across his shoulder and jacket, which gave the groom portraits a weight that balanced against the airiness of Anastasia’s suite down the hall. His groomsmen were already three fingers into a bottle of bourbon when I walked in, ties half-knotted, someone’s jacket already on the floor. The candid frames from that room, glasses raised, one guy laughing so hard he had to sit down, are some of the loosest images from the entire day, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give a getting-ready room.
Back to the Walk
So: the walk. Via San Giovanni del Toro connects Palazzo Avino to the Caruso along a narrow pedestrian street lined with old stone walls and gardens spilling over the top of them. On a map it takes ten minutes. We took forty, and every one of those extra thirty minutes earned its place in the final gallery.
Before we’d even left the Avino grounds, I asked Anastasia to set her bouquet down for thirty seconds on a shelf of pale limestone growing wild with lantana, purple and yellow and white all tangled together at the edge of the property. The calla lilies in her bouquet were nearly black at the center, deepening to burgundy at the edges, and against that rock and those wildflowers the color read almost gothic, a sharp contrast to every pastel wedding I usually photograph on this coast. It’s a small detail shot, the kind that never makes the highlight reel a couple shows their friends, but it’s the frame I go back to most when I think about that morning.
CREAMY COLORS
I enjoy preserving emotions within breathtaking settings filled with elegant lighting in picturesque locations across Italy and beyond. I take pride in creating moments shaped by my vision, my approach to work, and above all, my intuition.
RAVELLO STORIES
The street works as a location because it functions like a canyon, high walls on both sides, vegetation hanging down from above, light filtering through in patches rather than falling flat and direct. At midday this produces some of the best natural light in Ravello: soft, indirect, and warmed by stone bouncing it back from either side. Anastasia and Joe walked ahead of me holding hands, her dress catching the breeze, him carrying her bouquet so she could gather the fabric with her free hand. I stayed a few steps back with a long lens and let the street compose itself.
We stopped three times. The first was at a stone wall where a cascade of magenta bougainvillea had taken over the entire facade, and I put them against it with the flowers rising above and behind them, the warm stone and the saturated pink doing color work I could never fake in a studio. The second stop was the one that surprised me most: an ornate iron gate, arched and worked into a fan pattern, opening onto a cypress-lined path that runs straight toward Ravello’s Municipio, the town hall, right off the main piazza. I put them in the doorway of the gate itself, the path disappearing behind them under the cypress canopy, the whole frame reading like an invitation into somewhere neither of them had been yet. The third stop was a pair of old stone arches side by side, weathered and patched with cement in places, a bell tower visible hazily behind them through the gap. They stood close under the arch on the left, and I didn’t ask them to kiss. They just did, on their own timeline, which is always the better photograph.
Those forty minutes on Via San Giovanni del Toro produced images that look like they belong to a quieter, more private day: sunlit, unhurried, the two of them alone in an Italian town with nobody watching except a woman in a window somewhere above them. In the finished gallery, this sequence sits between the formal getting-ready portraits and the ceremony, and it gives the whole story a breath that most wedding timelines don’t build in.
The Ceremony at Hotel Caruso
The ceremony took place on an open lawn at the Caruso in the late afternoon, chiavari chairs in white running along both sides of an aisle carpeted in white rose petals, the Lattari mountains filling the entire backdrop behind the altar rather than the sea, which surprises most people who assume every ceremony here looks out over open water. This particular lawn faces inland, toward rock and green ridgeline, and the effect is its own kind of dramatic, closer and more enclosing than a sea view rather than less impressive.
Anastasia walked the aisle on her father’s arm, the cowboy hat now retired for the ceremony itself, replaced by an expression he did not try to control. The sun at that hour sat low and to the side, which put a rim of light around her hair and veil and separated her cleanly from the green hillside behind, the kind of separation that flat, front-on light never manages to produce. The ceremony was symbolic, which gave them room to write their own words rather than recite something borrowed. The vows were handwritten, delivered in a blend of plain English and the occasional Texas drawl that got a laugh out of the second row more than once. When Joe placed the ring on Anastasia’s finger, his hand shook, just slightly, and I was close enough with a longer lens to catch it. Nobody past the third row would have seen that tremor. It says more about the size of the moment than any wide shot of the lawn could.
The recessional had zero interest in restraint. Petals went up in the air, guests were on their feet before the couple had taken three steps, and somewhere behind me the groomsmen started a chant I never fully made out but that got louder with every stride back up the aisle. The ceremony was over. The party had already started, several minutes before anyone officially announced it.
Blue Hour at the Infinity Pool
While the guests moved toward cocktails, I pulled Anastasia and Joe aside for ten minutes at the Caruso’s infinity pool, the one that appears to spill directly into the coastline and the sea beyond it. The technical problem with this hour is color temperature: the sky after sunset turns a cold, saturated blue, and skin photographed under that light alone goes flat and grey. I put a warming gel on my flash so the light hitting their faces matched candlelight rather than the color of the sky behind them. The result splits the frame into two temperatures at once, warm subjects against a cold background, and the eye goes straight to the warmth, which is exactly the point. Joe had his arm around her waist, both of them looking out at the coast rather than at me, and for about ninety seconds the sky still had color and their faces still had light. Ten minutes later, neither would have been true anymore.
The Reception Under the Olives
Dinner was set under a stand of old olive trees on a terrace that, unlike the ceremony lawn, does face the sea, string lights strung through the branches and candles down the length of every table. Anastasia’s father gave his toast standing just beneath the canopy, cowboy hat back on, a bolo tie catching the last of the light, the coastline falling away behind him in the frame. He opened with a joke about the drive up from Naples that nobody outside the family fully understood, and closed with a line about watching his daughter become someone else’s family without stopping being his, and by the end of it there was not a dry eye at the parents’ table. Joe’s best man followed with a slideshow that ran two minutes too long and got laughs anyway.
For the dinner itself I put the flash away entirely. Direct flash kills candlelight, flattens it into something artificial, so I switched to fast prime lenses at wide apertures and let the candles and string lights do the work themselves. The trade-off is a thin depth of field: sharp eyes, everything else dissolving into soft gold circles of bokeh behind the speakers. The pictures look the way the terrace felt that night, warm, a little loud, lit from a dozen small sources instead of one big one.
Cake and the Pool, After Dark
Well after the sun had gone, the two of them cut the cake on a small round table set on the poolside terrace, white columns wrapped in ivy on either side and the pool glowing turquoise just past Joe’s shoulder, the lights of the town scattered across the hillside further back in the dark. Nobody jumped in. Nobody was ever going to. What happened instead was smaller and better: Joe stole a bite of frosting before the knife had even come down, Anastasia laughed at him for it, and for a few seconds the whole wedding paused around that one round table while the pool glowed behind them like something out of a postcard nobody had staged. It’s one of the quietest scenes in the gallery and one of the ones I’d choose first if I could only keep a handful.
The Texan Dance Floor
When the dancing started for real, the Texan half of the guest list took over the floor completely. Ties came off. Shoes came off, Anastasia’s included, and she kept going barefoot for the rest of the night without appearing to notice or care. I switched to a slow shutter paired with on-camera flash, which freezes the subject in sharp focus while everything moving around them, the string lights, the DJ rig, someone’s arm mid-air, streaks and blurs into motion. The resulting images are loud and a little chaotic, which is precisely what the dance floor was. I stopped shooting a little after one in the morning, not because the light had run out, but because the story had already told itself completely: two venues, two families from two very different worlds, one coast holding all of it together, and a gallery that runs from a quiet mirror in a pink hotel room to a barefoot bride still dancing well past midnight.
Both venues have their own dedicated guides on the site: the Palazzo Avino wedding guide covers the suites, the terraces, and Rossellini’s, while the Hotel Caruso wedding guide goes deeper into the gardens, the infinity pool, and the kitchen garden most guests never see. For a wider look at how ceremonies and receptions play out across the town, our wedding in Ravello guide covers venues beyond these two.
If you’re planning your own two-venue day, or trying to decide between the Avino and the Caruso in the first place, get in touch with your dates and I’ll help you figure out what actually fits your day.
OUR RELATED RAVELLO WEDDING STORIES
Alida and Michael at Belmond Hotel Caruso
Shiva and Michael – Palazzo Confalone
Wedding at Palazzo Avino – Fabiano and Oliver
Palazzo Avino – Austin and Emily
Palazzo Confalone – Holly and Ben
Hotel Caruso – Tim and Yafei
CELEBRATE YOUR LOVE IN AMALFI COAST
Written By Emiliano Russo