Luna Bonaccorsi and Leonardo Bormioli married after fifteen years together. That is the first fact from this wedding worth remembering, because everything else around it is a level of splendour few could repeat - while fifteen years is something anyone can.

The wedding lasted two days at Feudo del Castelluccio, a seventeenth-century family estate in Sicily that the bride's parents restored. Her mother is Luisa Beccaria, the Italian designer; her father is Prince Lucio Bonaccorsi di Reburdone.

A dress her mother made

Here the story becomes more interesting than the usual wedding write-up. The bride walked towards the altar in a haute couture dress inspired by a design of her mother's from 1993. White silk organza, fine floral embroidery, and a veil described as a cascade of jasmine.

„Designing my daughter's wedding dress was different from any dress I have ever created. Seeing her that happy was one of the most emotional moments of my life,” Beccaria said.

Where we come from this custom has its own name and its own weight - the mother's wedding dress, re-cut for the daughter. The only difference is that here the mother cut it professionally. The emotion is the same in a Sicilian palazzo and in any home where somebody has pulled their mother's wedding dress out of a wardrobe.

The second dress and one good idea

For the evening the bride changed into a two-piece - a short top with large ruffles on the shoulders and a high-waisted skirt. Woven into the fabric are optical fibres that glow in the dark.

The effect is a direct nod to her name. „It shone like a full moon,” she said. This is the rare case where a wedding detail is not decoration but a joke the bride made at her own expense - and that is closer to a real wedding than any symmetrical table plan.

Tables among the olive trees

The aperitif was under orange trees, dinner among the olive groves. The linen, tableware and lamps come from Beccaria's home collection, inspired by the wild flowers in the garden. The couple posed with a tall tiered wedding cake and with the Sicilian ceremonial torches known as „cili”, which carry the family crest.

What this wedding really demonstrates is not the budget, but the decision to hold all of it at home - on the family estate, with objects from their own collection, in a dress by her own mother. The wedding industry lives off the opposite: off the belief that a day is worth as much as was rented for it. This is an excellent reminder that the value sits in the things you already have, if you are patient enough to wait fifteen years before setting the date.