Romina Mascaro (In Liebe verbunden)

On her own About page, Romina Mascaro dates the start of her second career to one specific day, and she gets ahead of the joke before a reader can make it. "Ich meldete mich für die Ausbildung zur Traurednerin an und durfte am 1. April 2023, kein Scherz, das Zertifikat entgegen nehmen," she writes: she signed up for celebrant training and received the certificate on 1 April 2023, no joke. It's the only exact date her small practice, In Liebe verbunden, publishes anywhere on the site, and it anchors everything else about her that can actually be checked: a flat CHF 2'200 wedding package, and her own listed entry in the directory of the Berufsverband Schweizerischer ZeremonienleiterInnen, the professional association for Swiss ceremony leaders.

Mascaro was born in 1990 in Chur and has lived in the region since. For 9 years she worked as a video journalist and on-air presenter at the regional broadcaster TV Südostschweiz, training as a Moderatorin and reading the news and special programmes on camera long before she wrote a wedding speech. After her second maternity leave she changed direction: since January 2021 she has worked at the Rhätische Bahn, the region's mountain railway, though she says the taste for presenting never left her. What actually pulled her toward ceremonies, by her own account, was a wedding she didn't lead. In August 2022, in a garden in Apulia, she helped an Italian ceremony leader named Selena run a bilingual free ceremony for friends. She calls the day unforgettable, signed up for celebrant training soon after, and finished it on that April Fools' Day the following year.

Her certificate comes from the Zeremonien-Akademie, a private Swiss training school for freelance officiants, and its own page on what the certificate actually confirms sets out 4 conditions: active attendance at the in-person course days, a written personal statement of how the graduate sees the role, a written and reflected run-sheet from a real ceremony, and a pass mark from an examination panel judging a mock ceremony on its planning, delivery and self-reflection. The syllabus behind it covers 6 areas, from the legal basics of a ceremony through ritual design, planning and organisation, and storytelling and delivery. That's a specific, checkable training pathway behind the certificate date, not just a course she says she took.

Her site names 2 ceremonies of her own, and gives most of the detail. She married her husband in a civil ceremony in July 2017, and their daughter was born soon after. A Catholic church wedding followed a year later, in Landquart, chosen because both she and her husband grew up in the faith and because her late father had helped restore that particular church; he died half a year before the wedding took place there. She and her husband, who was born in Chur to a family of Southern Italian descent, now have a daughter and a son. None of that is written as celebrant marketing. It's an About page describing her own family, and it's the closest thing the site offers to a portrait of who is actually standing at the front of the room.

What the flat CHF 2'200 fee buys, itemised on her own page

The /freie-trauung page lists exactly what's included, item by item, rather than describing a package in the abstract: a non-binding, free get-to-know conversation, in person or by video call; detailed planning of the ceremony itself, its running order, any rituals and the vows; writing the couple's personal love story, the ceremony text and a timeline; communication with witnesses, family, friends and any other vendors involved, if the couple wants that handled; a joint site visit to the venue, again if wanted; her own microphone and sound equipment, brought along; delivering the ceremony speech itself; and the written speech handed back afterward as a keepsake. No specific ritual is named anywhere on the page; "rituals" appears only as one item inside the planning bullet, so a couple wanting something particular will be shaping it with her rather than picking it from a menu.

The whole package is priced flat at CHF 2'200. Travel to and from the ceremony location is billed separately, at CHF 0.80 per kilometre, and a longer trip needing an overnight stay gets discussed and priced individually rather than folded into that published number. There's no maximum radius stated anywhere on the site; the per-kilometre rate is the only limit she publishes. She runs a Willkommensfeier, a family welcome ceremony for a new baby, on the same page structure and the same free-consultation opening, for a flat CHF 1'000, and offers to discuss cost separately with couples who want to renew existing vows rather than write a first ceremony. Neither of those is what this listing is about, but they show the flat-fee structure isn't a one-off: it's how she prices everything she does.

German only, in the Graubünden dialect or standard written German

Every service Mascaro lists, the wedding included, is offered in one of 2 registers: "auf Mundart im schönen Bündner Dialekt oder in Schriftsprache," in the Graubünden dialect or in standard written German. There's no English page, no English toggle, and no line anywhere on the site claiming she can run any part of a ceremony in another language. For a reader marrying in Switzerland from abroad, that's a plain limitation worth stating rather than glossing over: whatever her celebrant work looked like at a bilingual ceremony in Italy in 2022, nothing on her own current site offers that combination to a couple booking her today.

No legal weight, and her own reason couples still visit the Standesamt first

Mascaro's own homepage states the legal position correctly and without hedging: "Die freie Trauung hat aber keine rechtliche Bedeutung, weshalb viele Paare zuvor noch auf dem Standesamt JA zu einander sagen," she writes, the free ceremony carries no legal significance, which is why many couples already say yes at the civil registry office beforehand. She never claims to marry anyone, and nothing on the site blurs a symbolic ceremony into a legal one. In Switzerland only a civil registrar, acting somewhere the canton has approved, can perform the legally binding act; Mascaro's own copy treats her ceremony as the separate, second event a couple layers around that requirement, which is the accurate way to describe what a freie Trauung actually is.

Listed under Zürich, practising from Graubünden

Mascaro's entry sits in the public member directory of the Berufsverband Schweizerischer ZeremonienleiterInnen, alongside dozens of other named celebrants and funeral speakers from across the country. Her row lists In Liebe verbunden under both Freie Trauung and Willkommensfeier and tags her canton as ZH, Zürich, which sits oddly against her own site's description of living in "dem schönen Kanton Graubünden." Whether that's a filing choice on the association's side or simply a stale tag, it's worth flagging rather than repeating either canton as settled fact: her own page is the more specific and more recent source, and it puts her plainly in Graubünden and the wider Südostschweiz her homepage's own title names.

What Mascaro publishes adds up to a small, one-person practice run alongside a full-time day job at the railway, priced flat, dated precisely, and honest about where its authority stops. A couple who need English will have to look elsewhere. A couple who don't will find almost everything else already answered on the page, right down to the day, and the joke about the day, she started doing this for a living.