In yesterday’s post on our Tuscany adventure I included a couple of photos taken in Siena’s Piazza del Campo of a wedding party that had either just said their “I do”s or were about to. It was a memorable image.

Siena’s Piazza del Campo is the enormous fan-shaped public square where the famous Palio horse race takes place twice a year. We have not yet experienced the Palio, but it is on our bucket list. Crowds jam the square and spill from the windows in the adjacent builings to watch as horse and rider battle their way around the treacherously uneven piazza. From what I have read, the contestants have historically been so competitive that assaults and possibly even murders have taken place among riders during the competition. It sounds right up our alley.

So stumbling across this wedding scene, with its beautiful young bride dazzling under a cobalt blue sky, the cool fall air caressing the nattily dressed wedding party and a soft buzz from the crowd that filled and milled around the piazza was a welcome juxtaposition to the harsher scenes that fill the square during Palio. But unexpectedly stumbling across any scene of spontaneous happiness and joy – like a wedding – is always certain to raise your spirits. If you doubt me, just head down to your local airport and watch families or lovers or friends reunite. You can’t help but be gladdened to see the happiness in their faces when they see each other in the crowd.

And so I thought it was worth just giving this day one more encore.

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We have stumbled across a few wedding in our travels in Italy. One such time was a couple of summers ago when we were visiting Sicily with our friends Pete and Nancy and John and Willia. On that day we had trekked up from the southern shore of the island to the outskirts of Palermo, to the ancient town of Monreale where we had an appointment with a ceramicist from whom we were buying figurines for our retail store Bella Italia. After meeting her and having lunch we walked to the town’s nearby cathedral, which boasts some fabulous mosaics from the middle ages. When we entered the church there was obviously some sort of service going on as the pews were filled with well dressed worshipers. A large group of tourists, ourselves included, ignored the goings on wandered about the massive cathedral, enjoying the impressive mosaics, when the entry doors swung open and a wedding procession began filing down the main aisle. Just like in Siena, the reaction was one of joy. And here, as in Siena, the impossibly beautiful setting was made even more beautiful by the people and the event that was taking place in it.

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Similarly, but closer to home, in the nearby town of Bevagna, one September day a couple of years ago while we were enjoying lunch at our friend Simone’s restaurant., we noticed a constant parade of couples, nicely dressed and clearly on their way to something pass through the square in front of us. An hour later when we had finished our lunch we said our goodbyes to Simone and wandered toward Bevagna’s main square for a small passagiata. As we neared the town hall the street grew crowded with all those couples who had passed by the restaurant earlier until traffic came to a standstill. All along the route we had noticed taped to buildings and posts xeroxed photos of a couple – who were obviously getting married inside the town hall – in various poses and in various settings, mostly at the beach and mostly in semi-compromising situations. The young crowd was waiting for the newlyweds to emerge from the city hall to congratulate them and to head off to a reception somewhere and we decided to wait, too. And as we were remarking that we had never witnessed an Italian civil wedding but only ones taking place in the church the couple emerged from inside to cheers and rice, the reason for the civil wedding immediately apparent, with the beautiful bride sporting a belly that looks like mine after a month in Italy. She was clearly pregnant. But no one seemed to care, the joy of the occasion infecting friends and bystanders such as us.

Later that afternoon, in a nearby wine shop we recounted the events to the owner of the store, joking “and when the bride came out of the town hall, she was enormous. She was clearly pregnant,” I said using the term incinta.

The proprietor smiled and laughed a little laugh. “Yes, but here we don’t say ‘pregnant,’ we say ‘she was interesting.’”

In Italy, things are always interesting, indeed.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy