A Buonopane Wedding

The next day was Saturday. We had a lazy morning, went to the cafe next door and checked e-mail, and came back to see some very dressed up people beginning to park all over the street in front of the church (which means in front of our room). Then we saw that special flowers and potted palms had been placed at the doors of the church. There was to be a wedding. Don and I went into our room, opened the shutters, and stood right there and took many photos. Here you see the bride and her father arriving in a chauffeured vintage Mercedes convertible and then the bride and her father ready to enter the church. Through the open doors we could clearly hear the wedding march. During the ceremony, we heard soloists--a tenor and a soprano--whose voices were operatic and beautiful.

David told us the wedding mass would go on for some time and suggested that we walk up behind the church so we could see Gianfranco's garden. It was such a beautiful morning and everything in the garden looked lush and healthy. In addition to lemon trees overflowing with fruit, there were artichokes, beans, herbs and aromatics.

Among these were borage plants whose peri-winkle blue flowers I picked to adorn the evening's salad. (We have a borage plant and I sometimes put the flowers in Pimm's Cups just for decoration. We don't usually eat them out of the drinks but the flowers are edible.)

As we returned to the house we noticed that local women, not dressed in finery, were gathering in front of the church, each bearing a plate from home. These plates held uncooked rice mixed with white sugar-coated almonds, or rice with red rose petals, or just almonds or just rice. They obviously wanted to be on hand to cheer the new couple. It was almost 2 hours after they went in that people began to emerge from the church. Don and I returned to our vantage point and got photos of the bride and groom with the priest emerging from the church to the strains of the traditional wedding recessional music.

The priest blessed the new union, the church bells pealed out for about a minute, and well-wishers showered the couple with confetti mixed with silver papers as well as the rice, almonds, and rose petals. Then there was the obligatory kiss, another cheer, the photo-taking, and then the limousine returned to whisk the couple away. What an exciting event to witness!

After lunch, we went with David and Francesco to Nitrodi. Our task was to fill empty 2-litre water bottles with the special Nitrodi healing waters. Francesco was filling 2 5-litre water containers because he and Elena had been bathing Gianni in the water all week in an attempt to cure his exzema. It seemed to be working quite well. The rest of us poured and drank water from the smaller bottles for the rest of our visit.

That evening we were invited into Ischia Ponte to have dinner with friends of Gianfranco's, people he had known since high school. Our hosts fed 17 people, including 4 little boys. As you can imagine, it was an exuberant, festive crowd. Two tables had been put end-to-end in the sitting room to accommodate everyone. Throughout the meal there was great hilarity, everyone was chatting across the table all up and down the long room. The three older boys (5, 11, and 12) were being typical boys. Someone had given little Gianni a hunk of bread to gnaw on as he was teething and beginning to cry so he was gumming the bread and making squeaky noises. Through all of this, the family cat which had crawled into its basket on the hearth, slept soundly...as did we all when we finally got back to Buonopane and into our beds.