Weddings Part 2: An Italian Job

Being married to a member of the Piedmontese upper middle classes, I was fortunate earlier this month to attend a family wedding in northern Italy. Mrs Bumwad’s younger sister got hitched, like her elder sister and her, to an Englishman – a charming man – and, as is the custom, the bride claimed precedence when deciding the venue. So it was that we trekked to Lago d’Orta in late September, a journey undertaken by car because of Mrs B’s advanced state of pregnancy, which forced us to camp overnight in Beaune (presenting us with the opportunity to bulk-buy some of the fine local wines).

No, mine says "Welcome to Italy, have a nice day."

As a digression, the idea of a motoring holiday in Europe has always appealed strongly, but I had imagined it in somewhat different circumstances: an open-topped GT, some Scott Walker on the stereo, travelling the indirect route on a whim, punctuated with lazy lunches consisting of six inches of Lyon sausage, a loaf of bread, and half a litre of Macon with the cork pulled. As is so often the fate of dreamers, the reality did not measure up quite to the ideal. Our journey was undertaken in a knackered old VW Golf, piled high with shit belonging to friends who were flying and wanted to make our responsibility that which they did not care to entrust to BA, EasyJet etc, with an 8 ½ month pregnant wife and a two-year old daughter demanding constant and repetitive access to three specific tracks on the original cast recording of The sound of music, and achieved via the fastest (and most exorbitantly expensive) routes, with lunches inhaled at convenient though scarcely sanitary AutoGrills, and punctuated by frequent prayers that Bumwad Junior #2 would not arrive prematurely in a lay-by delivered with the reluctant assistance of a Yorkie-spattered long-distance lorry driver distracted temporarily by a small spark of human feeling from murdering hookers.

In fact, Bumwad Junior was a remarkably trouble-free motoring companion, and the combination of the mountain air and the enthusiastic trilling of various nuns was sufficiently distracting to enable her to sleep for much of the trip and to remain rapt for the rare conscious moments. Mrs B was able to rest in a degree of comfort, our overnight accommodation was exceptionally pleasant, and I like The s of m enough to bear repeated exposure to ‘Sixteen going on seventeen’ with good humour. Nonetheless it was with an enormous sense of relief that we finally arrived at our modest B&B on the southern shores of Lake Orta, divested ourselves of the paraphernalia that had been wished upon us by various aviating relatives, and began to engage with the wedding proper.


In-car entertainment system: Pick up a Penguin.

Being an overseas wedding, of course, it was a protracted affair, with friends and other family assembling at intervals from Britain, the USA, the Far East and parts of continental Europe. This meant that, in addition to the wedding itself, there was a series of more or less planned social occasions in the run-up, including a drinks party but more entertainingly various ad hoc lunches and suppers in which tables rather joyously swelled as more friends and relatives arrived by chance. These placed no obvious additional burdens on the wardrobes of those invited, which is only to be understood because few people arrived by steamship with a large accumulation of trunks in which to contain a multitude of outfits. As the English guests were predominantly middle class or aspiring/educated lower middle or upper working class, there was a riot of what might loosely be termed ‘tertiary education leisure wear’ – White Stuff, Fat Face, Jack Wills, and so on – as well as the odd dandy who wore a proper shirt. Denim of course predominated. (Indeed it would have been obtuse to have expected much in the way of linen or tweed, except in the odd waistcoat or cloth cap - those garments which have worked their way back into the wardrobes of the modern Briton as an everyday accessory, having been revived as ironic and lopsided tributes to convention in the catwalks of Milan or Paris, where they were probably described as ‘witty’ ‘references’ to Fitzgerald or the Duke of Windsor in gushing filler pieces by Hilary Alexander in the Telegraph.)

(By a strange co-incidence, a poetry convention was occurring in the town of Orta San Giulio, which did indeed leaven the lump of thirty-something casual wear with a profusion of egg-stained rumpled faux-bardic corduroy, linen and flannel: some parts of the town square resembled a Brideshead revisited production in which the costumes were sourced from the back pages of the Mail on Sunday colour supplement. Although I suspect that those late-middle aged gentlemen that could seen out and about in daylight were poetry enthusiasts rather than actual poets.)

It should perhaps be made clear at this point that my wife’s family might be Italian, but they bear remarkably little resemblance to the Dolmio adverts, the Corleone family or any other north Atlantic stereotypes: my father-in-law has never been heard to remark, even in fun, “Ay ay ay - that’s a spicy meatball...” and my sisters-in-law have little in common with Joey Tribiani’s female siblings. My father-in-law is a dapper little fellow with impressive grey moustaches, and my sisters have lived in England all their lives and sound far posher than any Bumwad that has ever walked the earth.

My sisters-in-law do not look like this.

In much the same way that Alpine villages in France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy look far more like each other than the villages of the rest of their native countries, so do both distaff families look far more like other western Europeans than they do the swarthy, sun-kissed inhabitants of Apulia or Basilicata. Northern Italy, as the Lega Nord would maintain, is a different country: this was no clash of civilisations, and the differences between the Italian guests and the Britishers was far less than might be expected at a wedding between a Cockney and a Geordie – or indeed between a Fifer and Glaswegian.

A Cockernee bride and the lucky Geordie fellow.

Frankly the Big Day did not pose that much of a challenge in terms of dress. Although, as I said in the last post, I’m by inclination a morning dress sort of person, I’m also happy to defer both to local custom and to the preferences of the hosts. And morning dress is traditional at none but the grandest Italian weddings so there was no serious question of wearing anything other than what is usually described as a ‘lounge suit’.

Although such a garment is regrettably indistinguishable from a ‘business suit’, say what you like about their political stability and fondness for male eyebrow sculpting, but the Wops know their onions when it comes to suits. Grown-up Eyeties are typically very smart in their own way, as a brief passegiata around Turin, Genoa, Milan or Rome on any working day will demonstrate. I attended earlier this year another wedding at which a Briton was betrothed to a Piedmontese, and it seemed to me that there was in the dress of the older Italians much more dignity and sense of occasion than at many morning-dressed English weddings. And this earlier exposure to Italianate matrimonial custom indicated that dark blue is the suitable colour, in a plain or very discreetly patterned cloth; and fortunately that describes almost all my suits (except for my ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’ chalk-stripe, which languishes unworn, a testimony to the folly of youth). This was the archetypal ‘no-brainer’.

It was not this type of wedding.

Besides, I knew from my assessment of my prospective brother-in-law that he was unlikely to possess a morning coat, and still less likely to buy or hire one for the day. A graduate of King's College, Cambridge, he is a man of the fixed, if somewhat studiedly eccentric, views common among alumni. But what is sometimes an admirable challenging of convention can too often seem like contrived rebelliousness, and often it seems he takes a non-conformist route almost solely for the sake of non-conformity. For example, while I doubt he would wear a revolving bow tie, I would not be greatly surprised to learn that he had worn at a black tie dinner a white tuxedo, or even a black shirt and white bow tie.

My brother-in-law might dress a bit like this.

It was therefore no great shock when he eventually appeared clothed in a peculiar dove-grey ensemble, consisting of a single-buttoned coat, a four-buttoned [sic] waistcoat and plain-fronted trousers without turn-ups. I think he wore a belt with it as well. Now, this rig was not to my taste, but in fact it looked pretty good: it was a step up from the sort of suit he might have worn to the office, which showed a sense of occasion; and could probably be recycled at future weddings at which he was not the groom without fear of looking overdressed, indicating a degree of parsimony that would appeal to most brides. He even eschewed the pointy clown-type shoes he customarily wears in favour of a pair of pretty conservative brown Oxfords of only mildly ‘contemporary’ design.

His bride, of course, looked beautiful. And, while it is only to be exected that a degree of effort and artifice went into achieving her ‘naturally radiant’ look, there was not the depressing, yawning gap between the elaborate confection and visible expense of the bride’s outfit and the grudging meanness of the groom’s. The newly-weds were in a state of admirable proportion and harmony, as it should be.

I, on the other hand, succeeded in blending in, while not being mistaken for an Italian; certainly I didn’t ‘upstage’ the groom; it was, all in all, a satisfying adventure.

This did not happen.

Incidentally, there were no ushers (see comment on previous post), which at the time seemed controversial, especially in view of the number of moving parts on the day - herding aging relatives from hotel to church to boat to circus train to reception. However it meant at least that we were saved the absurd and aesthetically barbarous practice of coordinating ties and waistcoats for ‘the groomsmen’. It is perhaps interesting to reflect as an aside that the matching tie and  handkerchief get-up was in less enlightened times the prerogative of the adult homosexualist, a sort of sartorial palare intended to signal discreetly to other gayers that the wearer was ‘good with colours’ and/or ‘a friend of Dorothy’ and yet to be undetectable to the local constabulary, who would surely have wasted no time in banging up the likes of Herbert Pocket on indecency charges – a sort of analogue version of Grindr, I suppose. Now, to regard the practice of coordinating such items as absurd and barbarous is not to cast any kind of moral judgement on the practices of our ‘gay community’; but I think, like many pleasures of the naughtier kind, coordinating accessories is best left to be practised indoors between consenting adults.