Hindu Wedding in Italy: Two Days, Endless Colour
Two hundred guests, a Sicilian castle, and one hour, before any of it, that went wrong.
| The story · Two days in a Sicilian castle | Watch, 2:10 › |
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It started the evening before, at a villa above the sea. The turmeric ceremony, hands and arms decorated in henna, the patterns still fresh the next morning.
The Hindu ceremony was built as a piece of theatre. Colour everywhere, nothing muted, nothing toned down to suit anybody’s idea of tasteful. And the bride’s embroidery, which you could look at for an hour and keep finding things in, changed later in the day for a white western dress. Two traditions, worn by the same woman, hours apart.
What you will not see anywhere in the film is the hour before. An hour before we were ready, cars started pulling up at the gate. A handful of guests had made their own way to the castle, and they were early. We were still finishing the setting, the flowers going in, the last checks, the parts of a wedding nobody is ever meant to see. And a Sicilian castle does not have a waiting room.
So we did not ask them to wait. We brought the welcome drink forward, opened it there and then, and those guests spent the next hour being looked after instead of standing about wondering whether they had got the day wrong. By the time the rest arrived, everything was where it should have been.
A wedding like this asks for two things at once. Reverence for a ritual with rules you do not bend, and the flexibility to absorb an hour that goes wrong without a single guest feeling it. You cannot have one without the other.
The second dress, hours after the first. Munji and Roshan.
Ask how many people from the team will be on site on the day. If the answer is one, that hour has nobody in it.
Guests who make their own way. Anybody not on a coach arrives on their own schedule, and some of them will be early.
The setting up. There is always an hour when a venue is not ready to be seen. Somebody should be watching the gate during it.
The empty hour. Between the ceremony and dinner, guests need somewhere to be. Decide it in advance, not on the day.
In two weeks: how to choose a venue, starting from the day you are picturing rather than the price list.
If this story felt like yours, we would love to hear where it begins.
Begin your love story ›Common questions
Can you have a Hindu wedding in Italy?
Yes. Hindu ceremonies are held in Italy every year, with the priest travelling in or sourced locally, and the mandap, the rituals and the timings built into the day exactly as they should be. The legal paperwork is usually handled separately, at home.
Can you get married in a castle in Sicily?
Yes. Sicily has private castles and estates that host weddings, several of them with enough space for two hundred guests across several days. They are working properties, so what matters is who is managing the site on the day.
What happens when something goes wrong on the wedding day?
The couple should not find out. Most problems at a wedding are absorbed by the people running it, and the couple hears about them weeks later, if at all.
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