Paradise Found!

OH, MY GOODNESS. I can actually think of many more colorful words to describe the wedding, but all of them are insufficient. Absolutely amazing; decadent; joyful; festive; beautiful; gluttonous; none of these come close to describing it! But I'll start with the bachelorette party.

Be forewarned: I've been trying to speak a lot of Italian and I'm finding myself in that linguistic no-man's land where my vocabulary is English but my word order is somewhere between Italian and French. I hope this is at least marginally coherent, as my brain seems to not know which snippets of which language to use when.

We were told to meet in the piazza in Galatone at 8pm, and I was worried that we would be late when we arrived at 8h30. This was of no concern to anyone wiser in the ways of the South, however... we were the first to arrive--by a full hour's margin! Sebbastiano had told Tina that the two of them were going to dinner, but when she got to the car, he blindfolded her and drove her to the piazza, where she met all of her girlfriends--I think there were 13 of us total. We all took pictures with and of the blindfolded and laughing Tina, and we set off for a club to eat dinner and dance, Club Praja, the same place Caterina, Meri and I had been for salsa the night before. We arrived and ate a beautiful meal of assorted Italian pizze, antipasti, and risotto. I love Meri--she likes to taste everything, so we ordered in tandem and shared everything: insalata mista di mare, the best mussels ever, fish carpaccio, and risotto mista di mare. We shared a liter of wine and everyone else's food, too! The meal --because of the company--was pure entertainment. Caterina and Meri are from northern Italy, which tends to be stereotytpically quieter, more refined, better educated, more elegant, and more sophisticated than the South. The rest of the crew was from Southern Italy--loud, somewhat coarse, very off-color (in humor), sociable, flamboyant, decadent. The girls were amazing. There was Tina, the truly shy and blushing bride; Anna, the groom's sister who speaks only in yells and at top speed; the bride's sister, adorned in leopard print and her hair crimped and streaked, much like a dark lion's mane; two shy friends of Tina who had children of their own; and one extremely outspoken Sicilian relative, who was the wife of some cousin somewhere. The Sicilian was hilarious--at nine months pregnant, she took the occasional drag on a cigarette and the occasional sip of wine, but more than that, she danced, flirted with the waiter, and generally told dirty jokes so the whole restaurant could hear. I wished more than ever that I understood Italian, but when I asked Caterina to translate, she gave me a blank stare--apparently, most of what the Sicilian said was in dialect and nobody (even the bride) really understood it! They all got the dirty jokes, but much of the loud cackling banter was lost on everyone--except the Sicilian, who seemed to be having a grand time right by herself.

After dinner, Caterina, Meri and I had a hard time staying awake. We'd been out until sunrise the previous two nights and were exhausted from spending both full days on the beach, swimming and in the sun. Praja came alive at about 1am, and we started to dance with everyone, thinking we wouldn't stay very long. It wasn't salsa like the night before, but a drag show! Truly-Italian men can make some absolutely gorgeous Italian women. It was hilarious. We stayed and danced until 3 and then dragged ourselves back home to bed.

The next day we spent on the beach, recuperating from three hard nights. We found a gorgeous beach, Porto Cesareo--white sand, clear water, great music, fantastic landscape. The beach varied between silky white sand and craggy rock cliffs. It was magic. At sunset, we found a little place called Club Litos, a discotheque about two feet above sea level, built on the most fantastic landscape I've seen outside of Brittany. Rocks and churning waves as far as the eye could see, and a brilliant sunset. My camera battery had run out so I couldn't take pictures, so the girls and I sat and watched sunset in awestruck silence.

We cooked dinner at home that night--Frissa. It's a special dish just from Salento, the region within Puglia where we were. you pour water and olive oil on a special bagel-sized piece of dried bread, and top it with a mixture of tomato, oregano, olive oil, salt, capers, artichokes, and pretty much whatever else you want to. it's a lot like bruschetta. We added tuna fish and salame--and plenty of beer-and called it a meal. It was quite yummy. after all of the diet food in Trieste, when we went shopping for dinner, I made a mad dash for parmesiana reggiano and spicy salame and clutched them to my chest until we got home. No way was I going to be in Italy and not eat my favorite, favorite Italian food--I don't care WHO is on WHAT diet. I really must have looked like a maniac guarding my food, because Caterina and Merri asked if I were feeling alright. I laughed at myself and said yes. But I didn't loosen my grip. Mine. All mine. And I ate it all.

That night, I regretted eating it all... Caterina went to see the traditional serenade of the bride, but I was too full to move. She said that the entire family--of the bride, groom, and pretty much everyone who is going ot the wedding--shows up under the bride's window and all of them play mandolin, accordion, and guitar and serenade the bride. The first serenade is serious and beautiful, a song of undying love and desire. The next verses are spoofs of the real song, with the words changed to tell a story about the particular couple. Caterina said they were great.

The wedding festivitites picked up the next morning when pretty much the whole town showed up outside the bride's house, waiting for her to make hre grand appearance in her gown. First the best man and maid of honor walk outside on a red carpet, and then the bride appears, and the crowd cheers. She takes scissors and cuts a ribbon tied around the doorframe (no one's quite sure what that's about, but in southern Italy, you can't get married without doing it, apparently). Then everyone filmed video and took pictures of the gorgeous, gorgeous bride. She really was breathtaking. Tall, thin, dark, with dark eyes and dark curly hair, and graceful. She got into the convertible (a black audi A4, no less) with her father and the two witnesses (best man and maid of honor) and started for the church. Tradition is that the groom is in the church, waiting, and the bride leads everyone else, guests and all, into the cathedral. That was the plan, at least.

Then the chaos started! Evidently, the groom called his sister Anna (the really, really loud one) and told her that he wasn't at the church yet. Anna starts yelling and stopping the entire caravan to the church. She also was giving her brother absolute hell, from the tone of her voice and flush of everyone's cheeks. We drove Anna to the church with everyone else, with her screaming into her mobile phone the entire way. The bride had forgotten he rgloves, and Anna yelled at someone else to bring them to the church. An eventful morning.

We arrived at the church and sat through a beautiful Italian Catholic wedding. It lasted for about an hour, and then we were off to the reception.

The reception was perfect--I mean, if I ever get married, I want mine to be EXACTLY like this. We drove to the seaside to a restaurant and hotel overlooking the sea. We were all ushered into the garden area--waterfalls, beautiful greenery, wooden bridges, stone archways, champagne, and the beginning of the greatest feast of my life. While the bride and groom took pictures by the sea and in the garden, the rest of us feasted: arrancini, fried balls of mashed potatoes with mozzarella inside, meatballs with mushrooms and cheese, fried bread (like hush puppies, only a million times better); a whole roast pig; fried sage. The crowning glory was the man making fresh mozzarella di bufala right in front of us. He stood over a vat of steaming, boiling salty milk mixture, and dipped his hands in to pull out a mass of stringy, steaming mozzarella. He dipped his hands in icy water, stretched a string of mozzarella out, tied it in a knot, pinched it off, and dripped it in chilled salt water. We used toothpicks to spear a piece of cheese and bring it, quivering, to our mouths--cold and salty on the outside, steaming and creamy and salty perfection once you took your first bite. It was absolute heaven. It was opulent even as Italians go, as everyone was oohing and aahing and taking pictures.

It was paradise--in a garden on the sea with Italian men in tuxedos bringing me more food and champagne than anyone could possibly consume. I was absolutely beside myself. It helped that I was American--everyone was anxious for me to try all of the food and coo over it. It also helped that Caterina had told everyone that I was from Hollywood, so they regarded me for a few seconds like some sort of glamorous movie star. I tried so hard not to laugh, but it was fantastic.

Okay, I've got to go--briefly, the meal then lasted 6 hours and included 13 separate appetizers, 3 primi, 3 secondi, and gelato. I'm in Modena with Cat's family--dinner guests just arrived!