For Pia Arrobio, meeting the love of her life on Instagram made perfect sense. After all, the creative director of namesake contemporary label LPA and host of Pia’s Pod has garnered a devoted following on the platform thanks to her penchant for real-girl cool and tendency to overshare. After first spotting her on the popular page, Davide Baroncini slid into her DMs. “I ignored him [at first],” she laughs. “He called me complicated. It was all over from there.”
The two had their first meeting in L.A., where Pia was based. “I was so desperately nervous,” she admits. “I had two martinis at Sunset Tower before he landed and accidentally got a little drunk.” Davide was unfazed, and a bicoastal love affair ensued. (Originally hailing from Sicily, Davide was based in Brooklyn designing for menswear brand Brunello Cucinelli at the time and has since founded his own label, Ghiaia Cashmere.)
After a year-and-a-half of dating, the pair traveled to Sicily to meet his family for the first time. “Every day, we would go to different parts of the island, eating, laughing, kissing—just so in love,” Pia remembers. On Christmas Eve, atop a mountain in the church where Michael Corleone married Apollonia in the Godfather, Davide pulled out a ring engraved Pia Baroncini.
Following the proposal, Davide wasn’t swayed by a big ceremony so Pia made a cinematic gesture of her own. “He said he didn’t want a wedding, so I showed him Father of the Bride—being from Pasadena and a daddy’s girl, it was my bible.”
The move worked, and the resulting affair unfolded like a Meyers-meets-Fellini film: In front of friends and family from Italy and California, the couple wed at the bride’s childhood Pasadena home, where they now live, in the exact same spot that Pia’s mother and late father did 37 years before.
“It was very emotional,” notes Pia, who lost her beloved dad the year prior, while Davide’s late mother was too ill at the time to attend. It was a joyous celebration of their love nonetheless, and the newlyweds made their recession to Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” before sneaking off for photographs along a picturesque Pasadena bridge in their 1972 Alfa Romeo Spider Coda Tronca.
The reception vibe was that of a big Italian dinner party, replete with hundreds of lemons and custom hand-painted pasta bowls by The Setting, each serving up traditional Italian fare from lauded Venice trattoria Felix. The menu was very fitting as the couple first exchanged “I love you’s” over a homemade plate of pasta. “We just wanted it to be an extension of our real life,” says Pia of her vision.
Later on, the bride changed from her Brock Collection off-the-shoulder taffeta wedding dress—plucked from the runway and reworked by her friend and the label’s designer Laura Vassar—into a vintage sequined number from L.A.’s Happy Isles, all the better for dancing. Cigars were lit from matchbox party favors emblazoned with the words “It goes down in the DMs” and “Love is the Best (When It’s Not the Worst)”—“It’s something I used to say when Davide and I were long distance,” Pia notes.
At midnight, revelers toasted to another occasion: the groom’s birthday. “Chef Evan Funke made him a calzone with Nutella from our kitchen, and I brought out a very special 1972 bottle of Champagne,” says Pia. Before the evening’s end, Davide proved it was all worth it when he turned to his wife, grinning ear to ear. “You did it,” he said. “This is perfect.”
