The 10 best wedding venues in Venice

You can marry legally in Italy as a non-resident, and you do not need a second ceremony at home — a civil marriage performed by an Italian registrar is a full marriage and is recognised abroad once you hold the certificate. What you do need is a nulla osta, the declaration from your own country's consulate in Italy that there is no impediment to the marriage, alongside passports and birth certificates, usually translated and legalised. Requirements vary by nationality, so confirm the exact list with the Venice comune and your consulate before you fix a date. Note too that a ceremony at a hotel or private palazzo is symbolic unless that address appears on the comune's authorised list, which is why the binding one usually takes place at Palazzo Cavalli.

Late spring and early autumn. May, early June, September and the first half of October give warm, workable weather without the heat and humidity that sits over the lagoon in July and August, when guests in formalwear suffer and the city is at its fullest. Avoid mid-November to January if you can, since that is the core of acqua alta season. Bear in mind that the Film Festival on the Lido in early September and the Biennale across the warmer months both remove large numbers of hotel rooms from the market.

Access, more than the venues themselves. Nothing arrives by van: flowers, catering equipment, instruments, cake and every guest come by boat and are then carried over bridges by hand, and that porterage is priced into every supplier quote. Water taxis for sixty guests mount up fast, and island venues such as Venissa, the Locanda Cipriani or the Excelsior need a chartered fleet running to a timetable. Ask each supplier whether transport and porterage sit inside or outside their quoted figure — it is the most common cause of a budget overrun here.

Allow twelve to eighteen months for a Saturday between May and October, and secure the ceremony slot before the reception venue, because the comune's dates are the scarcer resource. Venice suits smaller weddings than most destinations: many palazzi and hall hires cap well below what a mainland estate can seat, and only a few properties — the Cipriani on Giudecca, the Excelsior on the Lido — take several hundred people comfortably. Sixty to a hundred guests is the size the city handles best, for boats and for bedrooms alike.