An Italian Wedding - Ilaria and J's Photo Page

Ilaria's Page J's Page

An Italian Wedding


(Click on the images for a larger version.)

As an American attending my first Italian wedding, I was greeted with many firsts. This wedding was the first one I traveled over 4000 miles to attend. After resting in Ilaria's hometown of Latina for a couple days, we drove 40 minutes or so, to the Church of Santa Oliva in Cori, Italy to attend the wedding of Francesca (Ilaria's friend from way back) and Ben (an American dude that Francesca likes enough to marry). Seems they got a two-for-one deal with their wedding location. They had a traditional Catholic wedding in a church built in 1467 that rests on the ruins of a Roman temple to Janus, the god of beginnings and endings. So let us observe through my American eyes, the end of this couple's early years and the beginning of the rest of their lives together.


But first, we gotta wait for the bride to arrive at the church. So I'll kill some time taking pictures from this church atop a hill.


Not too bad a spot for a wedding eh?


While we're waiting, let me introduce some of my cast of characters. From left to right we have: Alessandro, Daniela, Viviana, and Federica. I need to make a special thanks here to Daniela, who let me use her pictures for making this album.


After awhile, the important people began trickling in (the reason for the trickle is probably because the ancient road that runs by the church wasn't built for much traffic). Here we have Maria Pia - mother of the bride.


And here comes Francesca, led down the slippery stairs to the church by her quiet father Armando.





Inside the church, Ben and his mom await the arrival of Francesca.


Alright they're here, let's get this show on the road.


The small crowd of about 20 americans and 100 italians stand up to watch the beautiful Francesca Carapella walk down the aisle; then we all sit down to watch the show.


This ceremony was my first hybrid-language wedding. Ben, the American, read his verses in English.


While Francesca read her verses in Italian.


Stefania, one of the two witnesses (they don't have maid-of-honors and stuff like that in Italian weddings), lives in Minnesota with Francesca. Being Italian plus knowing a lot of the Americans, she was one of the key translators to bridge Italian\|American language barrier.


One of my favorite features of the Italian style ceremony was that I didn't feel so captive. The church had this huge side section where you could stand instead of sitting in the pews (most of the pews were filled up anyways with older people and ladies with heels). This side section was very free flowing (but quiet) with people walking around to see different parts of the service better or leaving for a quick smoke.


The roof was also full of beautiful paintings of bible stories, which provide a nice diversion for daydreaming.


The most impressive part of the ceremony to me was watching the strength of Francesca. Not only did she have to do all of the normal wedding stuff, she translated the sermon, on-the-fly, from Italian to English. The priest would speak in Italian, and then Francesca would give an English version of what he said. I also appreciate Francesca's ability to compress every two minutes the priest spoke into about 30 seconds.


After the ceremony was over,


we all waited outside for the exit of the bride-and-groom.


Let's take a moment to notice Ilaria in one of the few times in her life where she wore a dress and heels.


Eventually a small crowd formed around the door.


You can see Francesca is ready


and Ben is leery of


the pile of rice that would


fly their way (they still haven't switched to bird seed in Italy)


Here's Jamie, Ben's good friend and the other witness.


Then the bride, groom, and all of the wedding attendies took a group shot.


Another first for me was the lengths Italians will go to provide a nice setting and food for the reception. Shortly after the wedding, there was a slightly chaotic scramble to figure out how to get all of the Americans from this beautiful setting in Cori to another (more beautiful?) setting in Castelgandolfo. Most of the Americans shared rides with Ilaria's friends. We (Ilaria, her parents, and myself) hauled some of the American luggage. The reason for all of this orchestration was that the reception was about a 40 minutes drive from the church and none of the Americans had vehicles.


The reception was held at Castel Vecchio in castelgandolfo - the town where the pope hangs out in the summer.


Out in the distance, you can see the summer residence of the pope. You can also see the Vatican observatory (it has two domes on it).


I was surprised to find so many astronomy observatories in such a small town, but I guess it is so the pope can keep tabs on the heavens when he's away from the Vatican in Rome.


The pope's house and Castel Vecchio surround Lake Albano - a volcanic crater lake. The lake was enormous and amazing. Unfortunately, this was my best effort to capture the whole thing in one photo - and it isn't a great representative of what it really looked like.


The location was really something special - perhaps even worth their effort of orchestrating the 40 minute relocation of all of the wedding folk from the church. There were appetizers and things for people to eat while they waited for the bride and groom to arrive. Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of any of the food, but I just want to note in particular they had some small pretzel stick like things wrapped with proscuito that were really good. I have to remember to make some if I have a party at my house someday.


After eating some appetizers and looking at the scenic lake, it was time to make our way to our respective tables for the biggest meal of my life. I was at the Agata table. Thankfully, I already knew almost everyone at the table.


I also knew most of the folks at the Diaspro table. The tables were named after rocks (semi-precious stones I believe). The particular rocks all had a meaning relevant to the wedding or something like that, but I can't remember.


One thing that I haven't forgotten, and that I'll never forget was the biggest meal of my life. I was warned that Italian weddings are long and mostly centered around a very long meal. But I think this particular wedding was exceptional in that regard - even for an Italian wedding.


It was intimidating to even see the table before we started. How in the hell could we possibly use all of those forks, knives, and glasses?


Thankfully they provided us all with a small book so we could form our own individual strategies for how we wanted to attack this meal. At the top of the book, you see the appetizers that we just finished. When I have the prosciutto at my party, I must remember to call them bandierine di prosciutto that'll impress my guests more than pretzels with prosciutto wrapped around them. Every course in the meal is separated by four asterisks ****. So excluding the appetizers, we have eight courses.


Ok, let's start eating. We start off with a few different types of fish. I think they were dried fish? Whatever they were, I don't like fish, but they tasted pretty good to me.


With all of our fish courses, we had white Vermentino wine.


Here's the second course.


When this third plate came, I thought we were on the third course, but nope, This was just the end of the second course. hah! With the arrival of this red sauce there began a small challenge amongst Ilaria's friends to avoid spilling pasta sauce on their shirts. I was fortunate to be wearing a black shirt where you couldn't tell if I spilled our not. But many of the males (Andrea and Gianluca) spilled on their ties. A good thing about having such a long meal is that no one is any hurry and people are constantly taking breaks to smoke and chat. I'm going to take a break to give you my Alessandro series. For some reason, I ended up with a large number of pictures of Alessandro over the course of this day (most taken by Ilaria and Daniela). Let's begin.


Alessandro the philosopher


Alessandro the man's man


Alessandro the lady's man


Alessandro the loser of the don't spill sauce on yourself competition. Alessandro took the bait that no one else would fall for. We each had a pretty large crustacean in our red sauce - some sorta lobster like organism. Alessandro was the only person on our two tables that attempted to break open this red sauce coated organism and eat it. He broke it open, and shot red sauce all across himself and a couple folks at his table. The good thing is that in Italian restaurants they have baby powder so you can dump it on the stain and hopefully it'll come out.


To keep us from getting bored, they put fireworks in the third course - a giant fancy fish - and ferried it around the room for everyone to marvel at (another first for me).


We only got a tiny piece of the excellent tasting fireworks fish (on the upper right), but it came with some veggies and another crustacean.


We even had a special knife (on the right) to eat the fish with.


The fourth course was a desert of wild fruit intended to clean our palate to prepare for the second half of the meal.


One thing I found a bit different,


the bride and groom at Italian weddings have a table by themselves.


And everyone comes up and takes their picture the whole time.


The second half of our eating expedition was focused on land dwelling animals


and featured a red Rosso di Montalcino. I think they put fireworks in this meat before they gave it to us too.


The fifth course also came with a salad. But by this time no one was really eating any more. The first four courses were enough. Part of my strategy however was to focus on the meat-and-potatoes of the fifth course. But I also largely ignored this salad.


During the fifth course, we were greeted by the bride, Francesca.


And Ben found a nice seat for a visit with the American table next to ours.


Are you sick of food photos? Well I'm sick of showing them to you, and I was sick of eating (though I was still amused by the enormity of the eating experience). This here's the sixth and final course at our table: pineapple with some ice cream inside.


Check out the tiny spoon they gave us to eat the ice cream with.


The seventh and eighth courses were served together in a room downstairs that had an indoor pool in the corner.


These courses consisted of all kinds of desserts plus the Italian essential: coffee.


During this course there were pictures of the bride and groom around the wedding cake followed by the


obligatory cake


fight. After which, the three-hour, biggest meal I'd ever participated in was officially over.


With our full bellies, we all headed out to the lower patio to take in the sites and digest.


I hung out with Ilaria and her friends for a while, until my brain got tired of Italian


and I headed out to explore


castel vecchio


and the scenery of castelgandolfo.


Aldo


and Andrea


provided a little comic relief


during our digestion break. Ilaria's friends also bought a poster


that most of the people at the reception signed.


To add some American spin to their Italian wedding, Francesca threw out her flowers, which after one failed attempt were caught by Stefania.


Then Ben threw out the garter belt, which proceeded to fly right through the fingers of the non-baseball playing Italian men


and right into my hands (after which Aldo and Andrea put it on my head).


By this time, the older Italians


were starting to take their wedding prizes and trickle away to their homes.


And as a final surpise, Francesca's parents added the typical American ending to the wedding day by hiring a band.


I joined the action early on by breaking it down with Mariassunta,


but Ilaria was embarrassed for some reason by my dancing with her mom. But Mariassunta kept the dance floor alive for the first part of the dance party.


However, American weddings don't usually start at 10AM and have a 3hr meal in the middle. So after an initial wave, the dancing started to die down. I felt kinda bad for the band at the point, because they were playing to an empty room (everyone was outside). Then again, there aren't really wedding bands in Italy like there are in the US. So this was kinda a learning experience for everyone with the band trying to figure out what would get people up and dancing (Hint to future Italian wedding bands: the key is to not play too many slow songs!)


But where there's a willing group of friends:


gals,


guys,


and lots of champagne,


a dance party is inevitable. The thing that was missing from the American style wedding was the older folks. The best part of an American wedding is watching all the grandparents letting it loose on the dance floor. But again, the early Italian start was just not conducive to this type of all inclusive dancing.


But we did the best we could from the duet of Alfredo and Antonella


to the smooth moves of Gianluca.


Erh, Gianluca what are you doing?


Here we have Andrea - one of the craziest Italians at the party and Nathan - one of the craziest Americans at the party. It seems their doing some kinda cross-cultural dance. Err, I don't really know what's going on here either.


Before long, the champagne had inspired the groom to the point


where he decided he knew how to sing. And we all received a unique version of the old classic tune My Way.


Meanwhile the parents, who'd been sharing a little quiet time together,


decided it was time for bed


and had an emotional last dance


with their newly married daughter.


Then it was time


for one final cake


on the face.


But it seemed that Francesca didn't want cake on her face this time.


And she refused to even it up by putting cake on Ben's face. I felt a little nervous here, because the scene felt a little tense


until Ben's friend Jamie snuck up from behind and pushed Ben's face into the cake.


Much better.


Then Ben gave Maria Pia a goodnite cake kiss.


And Ilaria's friends gave Francesca and Ben their present.


The gift turned out to be a bad joke. There was supposed to be money in this cement block.


But the hammer broke before the cement block did.


It was getting late,


so after a final hug from the boys


and a final leg shot with the girls (where my gal was a little too gracious with her leg showing)


we were served a final meal.


Ilaria got a little more comfortable


And we took a final shot together.


And the ghost of Gianluca kindly gave us a ride back to Latina.


You only get one wedding day. And let me tell you, an Italian-American hybrid wedding guarantees that you won't reach the end of the day wishing you could have more. We left for the wedding at 9AM and arrived home at 2AM. I've never seen anything like that in my life. 17 hours of wedding - and you thought this album was long, try doing the real thing! But it was really an experience I'll never forget. It was extremely well planned and great to be a part of. And I wish Francesca and Ben all the best for their continued life together.