A wedding in Italy sounds like a dream until you try to plan one from another country. The language, the contracts, the vendors you have never met, the logistics of moving a hundred guests across a region you barely know. This is the gap Sabrina Carbone has built a career on closing, and it is why couples from New York to the Gulf hand her one of the most important days of their lives without a second thought.
From the trading floor to the wedding aisle
Carbone did not start in events. Her early career was in banking in London, a world of spreadsheets and high stakes that taught her how to manage risk, read a budget, and keep a cool head when a lot of money is on the line. It was there that she spotted a rising demand for destination weddings, and she decided to answer it back home in Italy.
When she returned, she built her planning business while also working in luxury handbag design and launching a brand of her own. That detour was not a distraction, it was training. It sharpened her eye for material, proportion, and the way small design choices add up to a feeling, the same instinct she now brings to a table setting or a color palette.
The Extraordinaire, and the case for saying no
Today she runs The Extraordinaire, a luxury wedding studio positioned on the border of Tuscany and Umbria. The defining choice of the business is not what she takes on but what she turns down. Carbone keeps a deliberately small client list, because the promise she makes is personal attention from the first call to the final thank you note, and that promise breaks the moment the calendar gets too crowded.
She is the single point of contact throughout, which sounds simple until you consider how many planners hand clients off to a rotating cast of assistants. With Carbone, the person a couple falls in love with at the first meeting is the same person standing quietly at the edge of the ceremony, making sure every piece lands.
Design and logistics, held in the same hand
The reason the work is hard is that it asks for two very different talents at once. One is aesthetic, the florals, the tones, the way people move through a space across an evening. The other is operational, the vendor contracts, the timelines, the transport, the budget tracked in real time so an international couple always knows exactly where their money is going.
