Tuscany

Tuscany gives you the best produce to price ratio in Europe, villas built for thirty at one table and a trade that understands weddings better than anywhere on this list.

Tuscany is the market where the produce does the work. Beef from Chianina cattle, pecorino from Pienza, bread without salt because the oil is the seasoning, porcini in autumn and tomatoes in July that need a knife and nothing else. A competent cook with a Tuscan shopping list and a wood oven will out-dinner a brilliant chef working with supermarket produce in a colder country, which is why menus here should be short, seasonal and unembarrassed.

Prices are the lowest in this guide relative to what arrives on the plate. Food and kitchen for a four course plated dinner runs 130 to 190 euros a guest, service staff 22 to 30 euros an hour, and a private chef for a villa is 400 to 650 euros a day. A wedding banquet for a hundred, catered properly with a full brigade and rentals, lands where a London dinner for thirty would.

Two cautions. First, the villa licence, not the town, usually decides your music curfew, and foreign hosts discover this at 23:30. Second, August heat and hill roads make cold chain the real technical problem: a three hour transfer from Florence in a van without refrigeration is how a beautiful menu becomes a health risk. Use local suppliers, cook on site, and plan the antipasto so it survives the twenty minutes while everyone photographs the cypresses.