Tuscan Wedding Romance with a Modern Twist at Historic Villa Mangiacane
Villa Mangiacane knows how to do weddings, and the property offers numerous beautiful spots around its grounds for ceremonies and receptions. Couples can say their vows in the restored chapel, lush gardens, or romantic courtyards—each with breathtaking views over the Tuscan countryside. The villa's event team is hands-on, making sure every detail is personalized and carried out to perfection.
For guests who stay overnight, Villa Mangiacane offers luxurious suites and stylishly furnished rooms scattered across the main villa and nearby buildings. Interiors are warm and inviting, mixing classic Tuscan personality, antique pieces, and modern amenities. Guests are made to feel comfortable, perhaps even a bit pampered. Beyond just a place to rest, guests can taste premium wines from the villa's own vineyards, enjoy delicious Tuscan dishes prepared by the in-house culinary team, and relax with exclusive spa treatments and both an outdoor and indoor pool.
Surrounding the villa are other famous vineyards—including Antinori, known for some of Tuscany's finest wines. On the property itself, the gardens host a carefully selected sculpture collection, blending global artistry and Florentine tradition. With its combination of quiet luxury, genuine Italian spirit, and careful attention to detail, Villa Mangiacane makes for an unforgettable choice for couples planning a wedding in Tuscany.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Cosmopolitan
4 hours ago
- Cosmopolitan
22 baby names rising in popularity inspired by old Hollywood celebrities in 2025
When it comes to naming a baby, it's a pretty big deal – and not a decision to be taken lightly. Some parents seek out a popular name (so the child has no issue with people pronouncing or spelling it), while others may want a moniker that evokes images of nature, or that has a literary feel to it. Or perhaps you're in the market for a name that conjures up the vibe of the Golden Age of Hollywood, which spanned from the 1910s to the 1960s: one full of glamour, art and that has a classic air to it. It looks like that could well be the case for more and more families who are welcoming a bundle of joy, as the below names – all of which are associated with a famous face from days gone by – have been steadily creeping up (or in some cases, shooting to the top of!) the rankings in England and Wales, according to the latest baby names data from the Office of National Statistics. Others, we've added for fun as they're rare but remain every inch the Golden Era. Here's a round-up of some old school Hollywood baby names, that would look just perfect in lights daaaaahhling! 1) Ava: Coming in ninth on the list of most popular girl names in England and Wales in 2024, with an adorable 1,774 of them making their way into the world, Ava is also a nod to the American starlet, Ava Gardner. As well as her famed career on the big screen, Gardner was known for her love life: she married Frank Sinatra, composer Artie Shaw and fellow thespian Mickey Rooney. 2) Sophia: Number 13 on the list (behind Sofia at number 12!), this name could pay homage to the Italian firecracker, Sophia Loren, who at 90 is one of the final survivors of Hollywood's Golden Age. 3) Evelyn: Known for playing Suellen O'Hara in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, actress Evelyn Keyes was a major Hollywood player – and a great source of baby name inspiration! The name 'Evelyn' was number 20 on the list in 2024. 4) Grace: Number 25 on the most popular names list, Grace has an elegant and regal feel – just like Grace Kelly, also known as the Princess of Monaco. 5) Elizabeth: Another regal name thanks to the late Queen Elizabeth II and an homage to Elizabeth Taylor, this moniker appears on the list at number 62. 6) Clara: Actress Clara Bow was one of the greats, and the name itself has plenty of fans too coming in at number 84 on the top 100. 7) Lillian: A great springboard name for nicknames like Lily or Lil, it also evokes Lillian Gish; one of the earliest silent movie stars, whose career stretched seven decades in total. Lillian was #309 last year and the chosen baby name for 140 little ones. 8) Audrey: At number 355 on the list and the chosen name for 124 babies, Audrey, meaning 'noble strength', is hanging in there (although it ranked higher in 2019 at number 294, after being used for 165 babies). 9) Mae: A popular choice for double-barrelled first names (e.g. Elsie-Mae and Ivy-Mae), Mae as a standalone is number 443 on the list. It reminds us of Mae West, so expect your little one to be handful! 10) Monroe: The surname of the world's most famous Marilyn, Monroe was chosen as a name for 72 baby girls last year. A unique and sparkly choice (expect this baby to have a penchant for diamonds!). 11) Rita: Although lower down the list at number 625, this name was given to 62 little girls last year. Rita Hayworth, who was actually born Margarita Carmen Cansino herself, would be proud. 12) Loren: Looking for a rare name with a Golden Age feel? Five families welcomed a baby Loren last year. 1) Freddie: A highly popular choice at number 13, Freddie can be shortened to Fred in honour of Fred Astaire, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-acting legend. As a standalone, the name 'Fred' placed #567 2) Henry: One of the biggest Golden Age stars was Henry Fonda – and his name lives on as the 14th most chosen on the list. Last year saw 2,360 Henrys welcomed in England and Wales. 3) Charlie: Like plenty of Charlie Chaplin's movies, this name is a big hit and the 17th most popular choice for baby boys today. 4) James: A good, classic all-rounder of a name (and one associated with many a big actor, such as James Cagney, James Stewart and, of course, James Dean). It's number 40 on the list today. 5) Frank: As in Sinatra, this name is number 194 and never really goes out of style in our humble opinion. 6) Spencer: A less popular choice but still a respectable number 210 on the list, Spencer Tracy (the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor) would be delighted, we're sure. 7) Orson: Orson Welles' Citizen Kane caused controversy when it was released in 1941 but went on to be thought of as a cinematic masterpiece. The name 'Orson' came in at 374 last year, and was chosen for 115 baby boys. 8) Gregory: Gregory Peck is synonymous with old Hollywood, and was the preferred name for 18 little ones last year. 9) Mickey: A unique choice, Mickey was number 1,595 on the list (with 16 babies receiving the name). Mickey Rooney, star of Babes in Arms (alongside Judy Garland) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (with Audrey Hepburn), could well have been the inspiration! 10) Brando: Chosen for just three baby boys last year, Brando (which is also the name of Barry Keoghan's son, in honour of his favourite actor Marlon Brando) is quintessential old Hollywood. 11) Burt: Chosen for just three baby boys last year, the name Burt was also the nickname of Burton 'Burt' Lancaster – famed for his star turns in From Here to Eternity, The Leopard and Sweet Smell of Success. Jennifer Savin is Cosmopolitan UK's multiple award-winning Features Editor, who was crowned Digital Journalist of the Year for her work tackling the issues most important to young women. She regularly covers breaking news, cultural trends, health, the royals and more, using her esteemed connections to access the best experts along the way. She's grilled everyone from high-profile politicians to A-list celebrities, and has sensitively interviewed hundreds of people about their real life stories. In addition to this, Jennifer is widely known for her own undercover investigations and campaign work, which includes successfully petitioning the government for change around topics like abortion rights and image-based sexual abuse. Jennifer is also a published author, documentary consultant (helping to create BBC's Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next?) and a patron for Y.E.S. (a youth services charity). Alongside Cosmopolitan, Jennifer has written for The Times, Women's Health, ELLE and numerous other publications, appeared on podcasts, and spoken on (and hosted) panels for the Women of the World Festival, the University of Manchester and more. In her spare time, Jennifer is a big fan of lipstick, leopard print and over-ordering at dinner. Follow Jennifer on Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
Eater
5 hours ago
- Eater
Rice Cakes Can Do Anything
is a senior reporter at covering restaurant trends, home cooking advice, and all the food you can't escape on your TikTok FYP. Previously, she worked for Bon Appétit and VICE's Munchies. In 2023, the Los Angeles izakaya Budonoki, then just a few weeks old, decided to 'dress up' as a different kind of restaurant for Halloween. For one night, the Japanese restaurant transformed into an Italian trattoria with Negroni slushes, arancini, and checkered tablecloths. Someone on staff offered the pun 'Budo-gnocchi,' recalls co-owner Eric Bedroussian. 'We were like, wait, that's actually really good.' Nobody in the kitchen had expertise in making pasta and no one had much interest in making gnocchi from scratch, so the team reached for something more convenient: Korean rice cakes, also known as tteok. Like gnocchi, rice cakes offer a bouncy chew, especially the long cylindrical rice cakes that the restaurant uses. (Tteok can also be found in flatter rounds that are sliced on the diagonal.) The team steamed the rice cakes to soften them, then seared them to create a crisp outer layer. Sauteed mushrooms, a dashi-butter pan sauce, and Parmigiano-Reggiano rounded out the pasta-like vibe. The Budo-gnocchi was 'so incredibly well-received,' Bedroussian says, that it had to become a part of the permanent menu. It hit the notes the restaurant was going for with every other dish. 'It's comforting and it fills you up if you've been drinking a lot,' he says. Once a happy accident, Budo-gnocchi has since become a signature dish at the restaurant, which was named an Eater Best New Restaurant in 2024. The dish has since evolved into a loose template, changing with the whims of the kitchen. The restaurant might upgrade it by finishing with black truffle shavings, or bringing in corn and tomatoes in the summer. 'It can be whatever we want it to be,' Bedroussian says. As Korean cuisine gains popularity across the United States, rice cakes — a popular street food — have established themselves as a promising ingredient for chefs cooking both inside and outside Korean cuisine. While you'll find them cast as other types of noodles (Sunny Lee's baked ziti-like rice cakes at New York City's Sunn's, for example, or chef Beverly Kim's tteokbokki pad Thai at Chicago's Parachute HiFi), chefs especially like the way their playful, chewy texture makes them a natural substitute for gnocchi. This idea isn't entirely novel; in a 2006 New York Times review of New York's Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Pete Wells recommended the rice cakes topped with Sichuan pork ragu and whipped tofu as 'dead ringers for gnocchi.' Chefs in Korea have been working on a similar culinary track for a little while now too. Traditionally, restaurants and street stalls generally use tteok to make tteokbokki, in which the rice cakes are simmered in sauce that's slightly sweet, spicy, and fiery red from gochujang. In recent years, they've been riffing with rosé tteokbokki, which adds cream to the typical tteokbokki base, inspired by both the Italian rosé sauce and Korean-style carbonara. 'Italian food in general has become more popular in Korea,' says bar owner and forthcoming cookbook author Irene Yoo. Given that Korean-style carbonara is made with cream and served with ham or peas, breaking from Italian tradition, rosé tteokbokki is 'an interpretation of another interpretation,' she says. The rice cakes at Sunn's are topped with mozzarella cheese. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet/Eater NY Across the U.S., rice cakes have recently transcended pasta dishes altogether. In New York City alone, there's the culinary boundary-blurring rice cake fundido at Haenyeo; the nacho-like chopped cheese rice cakes at Nowon; rice cakes bulking up galbi bourguignon alongside potatoes at Sinsa; and blanketed with mornay sauce until they resemble gratin at Gurume. At Yoo's Orion Bar in Brooklyn, rice cakes also turn sweet, morphing into churros: deep-fried until puffy and crispy on the outside, then tossed in cinnamon sugar and served with cream cheese-makgeolli dip. 'I grew up in LA, so I definitely had a lot of churros growing up,' Yoo says. While testing deep-fried rice cakes, 'I immediately thought of that as a taste memory.' For chef Nick Wong of Houston's new 'modern Asian American diner,' Agnes and Sherman, a dish of rice cakes with beef ragu filled the slot for a 'comforting, saucy starch' on the menu, since there's no pasta. It also represents a 'kind of 'if you know, you know' situation,' he says. Wong spent years cooking at Ssäm Bar, so the dish is in part a reference to the ragu rice cakes there, though with pork in place of beef because 'it's Texas,' Wong says, and to account for Houston's Muslim population. More specific to Houston, the dish has another reference: The Korean braised goat and dumplings, also made with rice cakes, was the signature dish at Chris Shepherd's now-closed Underbelly; the dish was beloved for the way it evoked the foods of many different cultures. With a sauce featuring Korean gochujang and doenjang, West African uda pepper, and Mexican chile de árbol, Wong's rendition is emblematic of Houston, where, he says, 'it's hard to tell where one thing ends and another thing begins.' When it comes to his rice cake dish, Houstonians 'just get it,' he says. With all its iterations, Budo-gnocchi is a 'chameleon' too, Bedroussian says. For a recent collab dinner with Indian sports bar Pijja Palace — an Eater Best New Restaurant that's known for its malai rigatoni (pasta with a creamy tomato masala) — the two restaurants served malai Budo-gnocchi. It's a little bit of everything: Italian, Indian, Korean, all through the lens of an LA riff on a Japanese izakaya. Between all those influences, rice cakes are in the middle, bridging the gap. Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Chicago Tribune
6 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Grass Lake boasts colorful history, abandoned island for sale
On board the Grass Lake Port of Blarney shuttle, through the mist of lake water, riders can see a small, abandoned island just barely keeping its head above the water. A few ramshackle buildings stand precariously, with the ruins of a few others scattered around the island. The 1.2-acre island recently had its 15 minutes of fame, although less as a media darling and more as an ugly duckling, with its $200,000 listing drawing plenty of jokes about its rundown condition. But just a hundred yards away sits Blarney Island, a popular stilt house bar, and its owner Rob Hardman admitted, with some humor, that he was disappointed news interest largely ended at the property lines of his island neighbor. 'It's kind of ironic that I got contacted by at least five or six reporters wanting to do stories about that, but not about the 124-year-old tourist attraction,' he said. As Hardman and other local historians see it, the island is a small peek into the rich history of the area, such as Blarney Island itself, and the Chain-o-Lakes has more to offer than just a sinking island for sale. According to Hardman, Grass Lake was originally known for its lotus flower beds, back when the water levels were lower. The blooms would bring people from around the country and even the world, including those interested in their purported medicinal qualities. Old postcards show the waters teeming with flowers, but today, they're limited to no-wake zones. At that time, what would later become Blarney Island sat on land. After the construction of the McHenry Dam in 1908, water levels slowly began to rise. As the story goes — and details can vary depending on the teller and their appetite for theatrics — there were two businesses near each other back when the water level was several feet down. One was Rohema, a resort owned by 'Shorty' Shobin, and the other was owned by one Jack O'Connor. In Hardman's version, the Italian and Irish mobs ran booze through the Fox River into Chicago during Prohibition, but when it ended, times got tough, and the two owners decided to wager their businesses in a poker game. 'Shorty loses, gets up from the table and blows his head off,' Hardman said. Then, O'Connor takes it over and renames it Blarney Island because, 'in addition to being a castle in a county in Ireland, it's also a Gaelic slang for bull — and he was bluffing in the game, so he won by BS-ing. So he decided to call it Blarney Island.' Clement Haley, the previous owner of Blarney Island and an area historian, knows that version, as well as some less colorful tellings, although he'd always heard Shorty shot himself at one of the cottages on the small island. Clem Haley said it was called Blarney Island because those on the island were a bunch of big talkers. Regardless of how rigorously fact-checked the stories may be (a Dunn Museum write-up about Blarney Island indicates the name change happened sometime around 1923, nearly a decade before the end of Prohibition), the tale shows some of the area's storied past. Previous Blarney Island owners Clem and his brother John Haley came into the picture decades later in the 1970s, well after the construction of the Stratton Lock and Dam in the late 1930s had made Blarney Island a true waterlocked island. Clem Haley, after serving in Vietnam, returned to the States and took over the island, rebuilding it along with his brother. The two recalled their summers coming out after the ice had melted to do repairs and work. The nearby island was owned by several Polish steelworkers from the city, John Haley said, who used it as a hunting retreat. Each building was a different hunting club, such as the Horseshoe Club, which is one of the few buildings still standing. The brothers had fond memories of the small island's previous owners. 'They were over here partying all the time, and they had parties over there,' John Haley said. 'We'd run over and party with them, and come back and forth when we weren't working.' The island would continue to act as a hunting retreat for decades, well into the 2000s, but it went quiet more than a decade ago. 'The guys got old, they all died, and then people started buying (from) each other. They got down to one guy owning the entire piece of property, Tom Nedved,' John Haley said. Today, it's reportedly owned by Kim Renner, who bought it in 2020 for just $50,000. The brothers say they have never met Renner. Hardman said the island has had at least two fires, and he isn't too certain about its future. 'It's worth a negative number,' Hardman said, pointing to how degraded it had become, requiring extensive investment to simply contain it. Additionally, it's on the flood plain, he said, and would face electricity and septic system hurdles as well. 'Maybe that's a campsite, but that's a pretty expensive campsite,' he said.
