Earlier this summer, we attended our first wedding here in Italy. Our neighbors, Pamela and Ernesto got married in June and kindly invited us to the festivities. This was really special for us because we mostly got to know them over the past 1-2 years as Pamela's father, Angelo, was fixing up the house next door for the newlyweds to live in after the wedding. Over time we got to know the family as Tyler and Angelo would chat over the fence, and we would exchange vegetables from the garden or baked goods with one another (our "biscotti Americani", aka chocolate chip cookies, have been a big hit). Because Pamela's mother is part of the family that owns most of the land around us, including the pizzeria on the corner and one of the apartments in our little building, we actually knew a lot more wedding guests than we expected because most of them are our neighbors! The ceremony was held in the middle of new Rende at the Borromeo church (an area described by one of our neighbors as "la zona più bella che c'è", or "the most beautiful area there is"... we tend to disagree but perhaps we've seen a few other cities outside of southern Italy).
The reception was at a nearby restaurant and included more courses food than you can possibly imagine eating in one night. We ate hardly anything that day in preparation, and although the courses were served over about 6 hours, it was still enough dinner for probably 3-4 separate nights. Everything was delicious. It was really fun to see the different traditions and formalities. A highlight of the night for us was the video that they played during the reception (between food courses 6 and 7 perhaps?). Instead of a simple slideshow of pictures, this was a full on reenactment of how, theoretically, the bride and groom found each other and fell in love. It involved her leaving him little notes in hidden spots in the Calabrian countryside and him chasing her down until he found her at the beach (San Lucido, for those of you who have visited us) twirling her hair and waiting anxiously for him. Words cannot accurately describe this video, and we wish we could have gotten a copy of it. It was a.mazing. It was also fun to see how excited everyone was about it, as well as all of the other additions to the night, including fireworks and the DJ singing really cheesy American love songs.
Another highlight was when we realized that the bride and groom might not actually know both of our names. We thought they knew Tyler's name, but we weren't sure about Lynne. When we had to search for our names on the list of tables at the reception, this is what we found (see the names at the bottom... "moglie" means wife).
To their credit, we actually didn't know the groom's name either, so we waited until after the ceremony to fill out their card. We all played it off just fine, and now we're happy to know that Pamela and Ernesto are our neighbors over the fence.
