Every issue, we’ll be asking an expert to answer questions you’ve sent in about your forthcoming wedding or honeymoon in Italy.

Every issue, we’ll be asking an expert to answer questions you’ve sent in about your forthcoming wedding or honeymoon in Italy.
If you have a question you would like answered then send it in to germaine@italymag.co.uk In this issue, Arianna Gnutti, journalist and marketing manager for Francesco Pineider Spa, offers some valuable tips on what to think about when choosing wedding stationery...

Dear Dream Italian Weddings & Honeymoons

How important is wedding stationery and what different products should the bride and groom be looking at? And how can I personalise the stationery my fiancé and I eventually choose?
J.C., Birmingham (by email)

Reply from:
Arianna Gnutti, Francesco Pinieder Spa

Hi J.C.

Choosing your wedding stationery is very important as the wedding invitation represents a visiting card for your wedding and sets the tone for your event.
Formal? Informal? Casual? A wedding invitation tells many things about your wedding. That’s why the bride and groom should spend some time in choosing the kind of paper, font and lettering style, the colour, and the kind of print to announce their wedding.
All Pineider stationery can be personalized with the company’s well-known printing and engraving techniques using exclusive fonts and characters. Once the choice of the paper and printing technique has been taken, the couple also need to decide which of the following stationery they require:

– Save-the-date cards
– Wedding invitations
– Wedding announcements
– Reception invitations
– Response cards
– Maps and direction cards
– Accommodation cards
– Reception stationery
– Thank-you cards

The very first step in setting the tone of your wedding stationery set is the choice of the paper.
Pineider papers are watermarked, which is one of their main characteristics, as is the water-cut, deckle-edged, hand coloured bordering, which is still carried out today using a time honoured technique carried out entirely by hand by highlyexperienced craftsmen.
If you are planning to have a traditional wedding, you might want to consider white or ecru wedding stationery which is watermarked, perfect for wedding announcements, invitation and thank-you cards, perhaps something along the lines of the exclusive Pineider Vaticano or XIII Secolo collections. The former is the most traditional choice for formal weddings: white or ivory, laid, watermarked, deckleedged water-cut paper. While the latter, an exclusively handmade, laid and watermarked 100% cotton paper, is the company’s most precious paper, most commonly used for particularly formal wedding stationery.
Over the last number of years, coloured stationery has become more popular, not only for informal occasions, but also as wedding stationery.
To meet this request, Pineider has created new formats and new colours which combine colour and style, including the Capri, Fiorentina and Empress collections, all of which can be found in boxes or expressly ordered to be engraved. They all come in many colours.
To personalise wedding stationery and make it unique, an exclusive printing technique is what you need. Pineider has been favoured by European stationery shops, not only for the precious writing paper sets, but also for their engraved printing (top, right), carried out by skilled Florentine engravers.
This technique, an art handed down from father to son, is becoming very rare and is extremely time consuming. A printing technique of such refinement cannot be realized on anything but the finest quality paper, firstly because the paper must not tear or distort under the press, and secondly because only on suitable media does the definition of the engraving successfully express the utmost in refinement.
Another way to personalise your wedding stationery is to have a blind embossing on it. To add a touch of class, the bride’s and groom’s signatures can be blind embossed on the Save the date cards. Blind embossing is hand-engraved die-stamping without the use of the ink. The result is elegant and refined.
It is also perfect for monograms, with the first letters of the bride’s and the groom’s name engraved on wedding stationery such as envelopes, save-the-date cards, wedding announcements, place and menu cards.
If you choose offset printing, which is much less expensive than hand engraving techniques, you can personalize your wedding stationery with monograms, as I mentioned earlier, with personal ink colours and with exclusive typefaces.

traditional invitations to an italian wedding are issued by both sets of parents ...probably one of the most ancient traditions related to Italian weddings, is represented by the bomboniere

Dear Dream Italian Weddings & Honeymoons

Can you please explain how Italian wedding protocol differs from other countries? (Regarding invitations etc.)
Maria McDonald, Fife (by email)

Traditions regarding the thank-you note cards are different from country to country

Hi Maria

Traditions vary from country to country, particularly regarding wedding invitations. Traditional British invitations have the bride’s parents as hosts of the wedding. In this case the text would be: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Murray request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Geraldine to Mr. Thompson ...’
Sometimes both families host the wedding together.
‘The Murray and Thompson families request the honour of your presence ...’
Nowadays it is becoming more prevalent for the wedding invitations to be sent by the bride and groom: ‘Miss Geraldine and Mr Christian Thompson request the pleasure of your company at their marriage...’
Traditional invitations to an Italian wedding are issued by both sets of parents. The names of the bride’s parents are usually listed on the left-hand page followed by the name of the groom. The names of the groom’s parents are listed on the right-hand page, followed by the name of the bride.
Less traditional Italian invitations are issued by the bride and the groom themselves. This solution is often used in less formal wedding ceremonies, if the bride and the groom are more than 35 years old or in case of their second marriage.
In all these cases, after the first sentences declaring the announcement itself, you will have the date, the name of the church, the synagogue or the civil registry office, followed by the address and the time of the wedding celebration. Please note that extremely Italian formal invitations do not show the year of the wedding. In traditional Italian invitations, you have the details of the address of the groom on the right-hand bottom of page and that of the bride on the left. In the centre, the new address of the couple. If the bride and groom already live together, there will be only this centred address.
Another difference between traditional British and Italian wedding stationery concerns the thank-you cards, which is the first visiting card of the newborn family. Traditions regarding the thank-you note cards are different from country to country. In English speaking countries, for instance, it is the bride who sends them out. In this case, her monogram or her name is usually blind embossed or engraved on the front of a folded card.
In Italy, the bride and the groom together send them out. They are correspondence cards which show both their first names followed by the surname of the groom (even though the bride always keeps her surname in Italy). These cards will be useful for several occasions for the rest of their life together.
For this reason, the thank-you note cards aren’t necessarily coordinated with the wedding stationery.
On a last note, probably one of the most ancient traditions related to Italian weddings is represented by the bomboniere. Bombonieri contain five white sugared almonds, offered by the newlyweds to friends and family to celebrate the beginning of the couple’s new life together and they are usually wrapped in elegant white fabric. These five almonds, called confetti, represent: health, happiness, fertility, longevity and wealth. The wedding favour tag matches the wedding stationery. It is folded and on one side there is the first name of the bride and on the other the first name of groom. Sometimes, below them, centred, there is the date of the wedding celebration.

Dear Dream Italian Weddings & Honeymoons

I’m Irish and next June (finally!) I’m tying the knot with my Italian fiancé. Can you give me any advice for designing wedding stationery for what will be a great big international wedding?
(The wedding will be in Fasano in Puglia.)
Olive Gallagher (by email)

Hi Olive

In the case of weddings between people coming from countries with different languages, you might consider choosing a folded invitation with separate wording in both languages, or you could print two different wedding stationery sets, as British and Italian wedding invitation styles are very different.
The less expensive choice is, of course, to have the two languages on the wedding invitations. I would suggest, though, to have the two languages also present on the menu cards and two different sets of ceremony programs so that this important moment can be easily followed by all the guests, whatever language they speak.
For more information on Pineider’s range of wedding stationery, please visit: www.pineider.com