What we do when the scirocco arrives at noon

Three times last season we moved a ceremony after breakfast on the day itself. Once for the scirocco, the wind that comes off North Africa and fills the air along the south coast with fine dust until the horizon turns the colour of weak tea and every piece of fabric misbehaves. Once for a February squall out of the west, an hour of hard rain followed by a washed clean sky. Once for August heat, when the sensible response was to move everything later rather than argue with thirty eight degrees. None of the three couples had a difficult day. All three had a second version already agreed.

That is the whole method: every plan has a second version, decided in advance, in writing, while everyone is calm. Not a vague understanding that we will improvise. A named alternative location, a named alternative hour, and one person with the authority to call it. Salvo calls anything to do with light and access. Cristiana calls anything to do with the ceremony itself. You are told what has changed and why, once, and then you go back to your morning. Couples who choose the alternative before they arrive almost never mind using it. Couples asked to improvise at short notice always do.

Wind is the most common problem and the least discussed. Punta Bianca and Torre Capo Rama are both exposed, and on an open cliff a light dress and a long veil stop being decorative at around twenty five knots. Hair does what it wants. Words are carried away from the two people who need to hear them. The fix is rarely to cancel. It is to drop to a lower shelf of rock, turn ninety degrees so the wind is behind the group rather than across it, shorten the spoken sections, and leave the veil in the car. The photographs from windy evenings are frequently the best ones.

Rain is a smaller problem than northern couples expect. Real rain here arrives mostly between November and March, and it usually comes in short violent bursts rather than a grey day that never lifts. Our decision point is three hours before the ceremony, which is late enough to see what the weather is actually doing and early enough to move people. An hour of rain at two in the afternoon in February very often clears into the cleanest light of the week by half past four. Waiting is a strategy, not indecision, and we will tell you when we are using it.

Heat needs planning rather than contingency. In July and August the reason the good window opens at 19:30 is not only the quality of the light, it is the temperature of the stone. Marble steps hold the day's heat long after the air has cooled. We keep water in the car, we keep the walking short, and we do not put anyone in formal clothes in direct sun before seven in the evening. If a member of your group is elderly, pregnant, or unhappy in heat, say so early, because it changes which locations we suggest rather than merely how we dress them.

Access is its own variable and it is not weather. Some coastal sites, Scala dei Turchi in particular, are subject to protection rules that restrict where people may walk, and those rules are set locally and revised from time to time. We work within whatever is current, and we will always tell you what is permitted at the moment you ask, but confirm the current restrictions with the relevant authority if your plan depends on standing in one exact spot. Sea state matters too: a heavy swell can make a low shoreline position unusable while the cliff above it is perfect.

One honest caveat. Sicily in August has become genuinely hot, and heat advisories now appear most summers. If your only possible week is the first fortnight of August, we will still plan it, but we will plan it late in the evening and inland. Our answers to the questions couples ask most often are set out at /faq. If you want to know what your specific month usually does, tell us the dates and we will describe the weather we actually get then, not the weather a brochure promises.