The concept behind Alessandro and Francesco’s wedding came before anything else, they called it “This Is Not a Wedding”. For them, the words had several meanings. The first was a nod to René Magritte and his surrealist work The Treachery of Images, with its famous declaration, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe). The second was due to the legal reality of their relationship.

“In Italy we cannot legally marry”, Francesco told us. “We entered a unione civile – a civil union. A separate institution, not marriage. So the wedding’s title is a reference, a provocation and a description.”

On 10 April 2026, they became the first same-sex couple to have a civil union in Montecosaro, a hilltop town in Italy’s Marche region. Their ceremony took place in the Garden of the Poor, part of a former Augustinian convent.

Francesco works as a floral and event designer, giving him both the experience and the contacts to approach the day as a full creative project. He began by removing the established wedding format and considering what could take its place.

“The rule I wrote into my own brief, the one I handed my team: minimal differences between compositions = high design”, he explained. “Uniformity would mean a normal wedding. We didn’t want anything to match and nothing was symmetrical or posed.”

The civil ceremony began at 5:45pm, with 50 black iron and wooden bistro chairs arranged in the garden. Alessandro and Francesco entered to Gabriel’s Oboe by Ennio Morricone and Concerning Hobbits. The focal point of the space was a 2.4-metre structure constructed from cotton branches on a concealed metal armature.

At 8:30pm, everyone moved into the storehouses for dinner. The tables were dressed with peach linens and the florals were parrot tulips, violet-blue irises, yellow freesias and chequered Fritillaria meleagris placed in black troughs using kenzan instead of floral foam.

Romeo + Juliet and Good Will Hunting were projected across the walls. There were no numbered tables or conventional place cards. Each table was represented by an image from the surrealist universe, and guests found their seats by identifying the correct picture. One image depicted the couple themselves: Alessandro as the anchor and Francesco as the rose.

They cleverly used their stationery to save spending a lot on hired tableware. A circular menu doubled as a charger plate, while a smaller printed disc became the bread plate. “We couldn’t spend an absurd amount on the banqueting, so the stationery stood in for it,” Francesco said. “Paper did the work of rented tableware.”

Favours were produced by Frolla Microbiscottificio, a social cooperative in nearby Osimo that employs 35 young people with disabilities. The organisation received the European Citizen’s Prize from the European Parliament in 2021. At the end of the event, leftover food was donated to the Red Cross in Civitanova Marche for redistribution.

Food was the couple’s largest expense, at over €11k. Chef Michele Biagiola had known Francesco throughout his life, making his involvement a personal choice as well as a culinary one. in fact, every supplier involved in the celebration had a connection to Alessandro or Francesco.

Karma B, the Italian drag duo, welcomed guests before the ceremony and remained part of the event throughout the night. Between dinner courses, they hosted a quiz, roasted the couple and later launched the party. DJs from Perugia’s queer scene, took over for the rest of the night. “The party wasn’t just decorated with queer culture. It was run by it,” Francesco said.

“My parents were the oldest guests at our wedding. My father is over 80. He arrived at the door of the town hall, saw Karma B, and there was friction. He was frightened about where he had ended up. It was nothing like his idea of a wedding. At the end of the day he asked me to send him every photograph of himself with the drag queens. When a thing is true, it’s beautiful. Everything is allowed, as long as you’re not disturbing anyone and not taking anything from anyone. Doing something to be strange makes no sense either. The test isn’t strange or normal. The test is whether you mean it. Whether it’s yours. Whether it says something about your life. Every supplier at our wedding was someone who had been part of my life or Alessandro’s. Full stop.”

For all the planning and visual detail, the couples’ favourite moments come from the human contact. Francesco remembers crying as he stepped out of the car, the energy of Karma B, the music, the rush of the party and repeatedly trying to work out where Alessandro had disappeared to. “And the hugs, there were so many hugs. Those were the most important thing in the day.”

Their celebration made room for heritage, queer culture, art, friendship and the people who had shaped their lives. It also gave Montecosaro its first civil union, placing two grooms into the town’s history. And Francesco’s advice to other couples? Make it about you: “Make a party that speaks about you”, he concluded. “Not a copy of a thousand others – anything sincere and honest is beautiful., even when it’s made with nothing. This wasn’t a wedding, it was the project of a lifetime.”