Time slows down when you walk through Rome. It slows down until it disappears. It goes hand in hand with a space that expands and becomes infinite. Rome is not one city but countless ones. Within it, you find all the ages, stories, and lives of the world layered together. Like a matryoshka doll, it reveals its charm to those who have the patience and desire to be amazed, to those willing to get lost in its corners, its alleys, its broad avenues, to those who are not afraid of its romantic and boisterous vitality.
Rome is beauty in its most chaotic and pure form, and on one of our latest visits, we could appreciate an example of this: the basilica of Santa Sabina. It stands on the Aventine Hill, in the territory of the Rione XII Ripa. It was built between 422 and 432, and today it is one of the best-preserved early Christian churches in all of Italy. When Alessia and Davide contacted us for their wedding, we immediately accepted, also captivated by the charm of the couple.
The site visit confirmed our initial impressions. If you’ve never walked on a floor built 1600 years ago, you will hardly understand the emotion we felt. And then the silence: every step, every breath echoed within those imposing walls.
On the wedding day, the July sun shone on the atrium, the porch, the bell tower with its cloister, and the Giardino degli Aranci seemed like the surreal landscape of a distant dream. But Alessia and Davide’s dream was real: it took place under our lenses (and those of photographer Andrea Calvano) and continued from the basilica to Villa Miani. Here, the couple’s friends and relatives indulged in wild dances and prosecco toasts in front of a terrace overlooking all of Rome.
When the music stopped and the last glasses were set down, a pleasant carefreeness lingered in the air. The city, a silent witness to the beauty of time and people, added Alessia and Davide’s most beautiful day to its endless story. We are happy to have been a part of it, to have captured fragments of it, to have intersected magic in the eyes of a loving couple and in the stones of that wonderful boiling artery of history, traditions, and life named Rome.
