Postcard from Sorrento - Weddings

Nobody does bureaucracy quite like the Italians. These are the people that invented the Catholic church – so industrialised the business of religion. Possibly that’s why the wedding I had gone to Sorrento to attend was so fabulous. Even though it was a civil ceremony, the civil ceremony aspect of it was ‘high-church’.

The registrar wore her sash of office – a well preserved fifty year old woman with just the right touch of glam, it looked for all the world as if the happy couple were being married by Miss Italy 1970. The interpreter ensured that the happy couple knew what they were signing up to – many official pronouncements of how you should behave towards one another and at the end of it a marriage certificate in a bloody huge leather wallet – it looked like the a la carte menu at Claridges.

The ceremony was at the Cloister of San Francisco in Sorrento and, as an advert for getting married abroad, could not be bettered. Guitar and lute players strummed, the public kept a respectful distance and the weather was kind. Even the volcano didn’t grumble. Somewhat better than a registry office in Guildford. Medieval Italian architecture has something of an edge over 1960s civic modernism or, as I like to call it, evil in concrete form.