Getting married in Rome is a dream for many couples. The Lazio region, to which the Italian capital belongs, is now providing a bonus of up to €2,000 for couples getting married or entering into a civil partnership in 2022.
Couples can apply for reimbursement of the cost of purchasing wedding gifts, renting a car, purchasing a dress and floral arrangements. However, it is also possible to obtain a subsidy towards the cost of the honeymoon, up to a maximum of 700 euros. The same cap was set for catering and restaurant services.
Reimbursable expenses also include purchasing the wedding rings, video service or photo album, renting the hall for the wedding and even hiring a wedding planner. With this initiative, the Lazio Region wants to revitalize the business related to weddings, which has suffered a severe setback since the pandemic. The crisis is particularly affecting southern Italy, where marriages are more frequent than in the rest of the country and, above all, with more guests.
In the first year of the pandemic, 2020, 96,841 weddings were celebrated in Italy, 47.4 percent fewer than in 2019. Both religious weddings (minus 67.9 percent) and first marriages (minus 52.3 percent) declined. For the first nine months of 2021, preliminary data point to a doubling of marriages compared to the same period in 2020.
However, the improvement is not enough to compensate for the losses of the previous year, according to information from the statistics office Istat. Civil partnerships between same-sex partners are also declining (down 33 percent), as are separations (down 18 percent) and divorces (down 21.9 percent), the report shows.
For more than 40 years there has been a downward trend in the number of weddings in Italy. Since the mid-1970s, there has been a shift in the age of first marriage and an increase in unmarried partnerships, which almost quadrupled between 1999/2000 and 2019/2020 (from around 380,000 to just under 1.4 million). The increase is mainly due to the increase in free civil partnerships (from around 170,000 to 863,000).
Source: Nachrichten
