Our wedding story: Wedding planner plans her own nuptials

Emma Naylor & Ben Mulligan

Emma and Ben, who have lived in Manly, Australia for four years, met on their first day as students at DIT in 2006, became an item in 2010 and were engaged five years later.

Emma loved planning their Italian wedding so much that she recently launched her own wedding website, ABridesAdvice.com.com.

“I’m a marketing and events manager, and project management is a real strength of mine, so add that to my genuine love for weddings and it’s a bit of a match made in heaven,” she says.

Dream setting

On August 31st, 2016, the couple married in front of 74 loved ones in Borgo di Castelvecchio,

Tuscany

– “a dream setting ,in the middle of nowhere, surrounded for miles by rolling green hills.”

During the ceremony, the bride's sister Lisa (who got married three weeks later) did a reading she had written herself, and both Ben's mother Maura and Emma's aunt read poems: A House of Stone by Carmen Bugan and Seamus Heaney's Scaffolding.

Ben’s father is Paul and Emma’s is Karl.

The three-day celebrations included a welcome dinner on the eve of the wedding and a picnic/pool party the following day.

"Because we chose Italy, a lot of our friends and family made it a holiday, so really it was a week-long wedding."

Settled feeling

Do things feel different for the couple now that they’re married?

“We both agree that it’s a lovely ‘settled’ feeling you get from being married,” says Emma. “We’re extremely proud of each other and definitely get all the fuzzy feelings when saying ‘this is my husband Ben’ and vice versa. We did expand our little family in November by getting a cocker spaniel puppy named Livi, so I suppose that’s one big difference.”

Photographer: Andrea Sampoli (andreasampolifotografia.it)