Why the last hour of light lasts longer over limestone

Three numbers govern most of what we plan. In July the good window opens at about 19:30. In October it opens at about 17:15. In February it opens at about 16:30. Those are not sunset times. They are the times at which the light stops being a problem and becomes the reason you came, and they are the hinge on which a whole day turns: when you eat, when you walk, when Cristiana begins, when the rings actually go on. Couples usually arrive with a plan built around a meal. We rebuild it around those three numbers, and everything else moves to fit them.

The reason the hour behaves differently here is underfoot. Most of this coast is limestone, pale and porous, and it spends the day absorbing heat and colour. As the sun drops, the ground and the walls give it back. Light arrives at your face from below and from the side as well as from the sky, so shadows under the eyes and the chin fill in on their own. In practical terms the usable window runs longer than it would over grass or dark rock, and the colour of it is warmer without anything being done afterwards. This is why photographs made here look the way they do. It is geology before it is technique.

The effect changes by site. At Scala dei Turchi the white marl is close to a reflector the size of a hillside, and in the last half hour it turns the colour of the inside of a shell. In the Valley of the Temples the columns are tall enough to throw long bars of shadow across the paths, so the useful ground moves as the sun goes, and Salvo works to that rather than to a spot marked in advance. Punta Bianca does the same trick as Scala dei Turchi with fewer people on it. In Ortigia the light comes twice, once from the sky and once off the harbour water, which is why the old town holds up later than anywhere else we work.

The cost of planning this way is that you eat late. A ceremony beginning at 19:45 in July is not finished with photographs until close to nine, and dinner lands somewhere after that. This is normal here and strange almost everywhere else. If you have guests coming from Britain or the United States, warn them, feed them something at six, and tell them the evening will run past midnight. In February the same logic runs in reverse: the ceremony sits in the middle of the afternoon and dinner is at a civilised eight. Nobody plans a Sicilian day around lunch. Lunch is what happens before the day begins.

Claire and Rob, who came from the UK, married on the thirty first of July at Moresca Farm and then moved to the Valley of the Temples. Their vows were timed to the last light rather than to a slot agreed months in advance, which meant the running order was set backwards from a single fixed point: the hour the temples would start to warm. Hay bales for seating in the olive grove, long tables under the trees, and then a short drive. Working backwards from the light is not a flourish. It is the only way to be certain that the important part of the evening happens inside the best twenty minutes of the day.

Between those three anchor months the window moves steadily, roughly a quarter of an hour every two or three weeks, and cloud complicates it. Thin high cloud is a gift and stretches everything. A bank of cloud sitting on the western horizon can close the window twenty minutes early, which is why we hold a second position at most sites and why nothing is timed to the minute. What we can tell you, for any specific date you are considering, is when the window should open, how long it should hold, and what the site will be doing at that hour. Examples month by month are in /gallery.

If you take one thing from this, take the order of decisions. Choose the hour before you choose anything else. The venue, the meal and the running order can all be arranged around a good twenty minutes of light. None of them can rescue a ceremony held at two in the afternoon in June. Tell us the dates you are looking at and we will tell you what the light is likely to do on them, and what that implies for the rest of the day. It is a short conversation and it changes the plan more often than not, usually by moving everything two hours later than people expect.