If you’re lucky, you’ll cross paths with beings who make everything more vibrant, more interesting, more urgent. And you’ll come away from your time spent together with an even stronger desire to do more, live more.

This is how we’d describe our experience photographing the weekend of Heather and Stefano’s wedding in Italy. Set across the rolling hills of Piedmont’s wine country, their multi-day celebration at Villa Beccaris in Monforte d’Alba was a dream: pre-wedding pizza and pool parties, and wine that somehow tasted better because so many of the guests had crossed oceans to drink it.

There was just such a beautiful spirit to it all — a quiet subtext that we only get a limited supply of time, and that it’s our duty to honour the miraculous fact that our atoms have been granted some of it together.

Stef grew up in Milan, Heather, in Hong Kong. They met in London where their two worlds collided and then folded perfectly into one another. Friends and family flew in from all corners of the globe to celebrate, turning this little Italian hilltop town into a week-long reunion of laughter, spritzes, and the kind of joy that doesn’t need translating.

When the wedding day arrived, a wild summer storm rolled through — thunder, wind, the full cinematic treatment — but not even that could slow the celebration. They exchanged vows in the ancient Castello di Grinzane Cavour, then wound their way back through the hills to Villa Beccaris for a soiree under clearing skies. Each course was paired with local wines, each toast louder than the last, the party carrying well into the early hours with pure joie de vivre.

Heather, Stef, grazie mille ❤️