World etiquette: italian wedding customs

A wedding is a celebration of romance, of two people joining lives, and of two families becoming one. As modern society becomes increasingly diverse, many couples personalize their wedding by incorporating family and cultural traditions. By following customs, each family is honored and introduced to the culture they now share. These connections are especially important in Italy, with its history of large, close-knit families.

Italian Weddings: Ancient Roman Customs

Italian wedding customs are among the oldest in the world, dating back to ancient Roman ceremonies. The Roman goddess Juno, guardian of marriage, home, and childbirth, made June the most popular month for weddings, a ranking which still stands today. A Roman bride wore a veil to disguise her from evil spirits, and she carried a bouquet of herbs to represent fidelity and fertility. Wedding rings provided a public symbol of the marriage bond, just as they do today. After the ceremony, guests tossed rice at the couple or broke bread over the bride’s head to represent fertility, and the groom carried his bride over the threshold of their home. Many of these customs can be found at twenty-first century weddings, demonstrating the longevity of cultural traditions.

Italian Weddings: Pre-Ceremony Customs

Italian men often propose through music, either by playing a romantic song to their beloved or serenading her with the help of musically inclined friends. The song may be a romantic ballad or may include questioning lyrics that offer the proposal itself.

Once engaged, a couple celebrates their impending nuptials with the typical round of parties and showers throughout the community. It is good luck for the bride-to-be to wear green the night before the wedding, which symbolizes the abundance that will follow the couple throughout their marriage.

Italian Weddings: Ceremony Customs

Italy’s population is more than eighty percent Roman Catholic, and a traditional mass is the most frequent type of wedding ceremony. A couple can choose to abbreviate the mass, but there are still many customs Italian couples incorporate into their wedding ceremonies.

The morning of the wedding, before the bride is dressed in her bridal splendor, the couple shares an early communion. The bride avoids wearing gold jewelry before she dons her wedding ring during the ceremony, since other jewelry would detract from the ring’s symbolism and the vows it represents. The groom, meanwhile, may carry a piece of iron in his pocket to ward off the evil eye.

The church is often decorated with ribbons to symbolize the marriage bond. During the ceremony, the wedding rings, which are often simple and lack jewels or adornments, are blessed as part of the ritual mass. The custom of a unity candle is often included, which involves both the bride and groom using small candles that represent their individual families to light a larger, central candle that represents the new family they are creating. This symbolizes the merging of the two families. The two individual candles may be lit by parents or siblings to further include family members and strengthen the symbolism.

At the end of the ceremony, the new couple may break a vase or glass, and the number of pieces represents the number of years the marriage will last. The couple could choose to include this tradition at the reception rather than the ceremony.

Italian Weddings: Reception Customs

An old Italian proverb, “it is around the table that friends understand best the warmth of being together,” is often used as a toast at wedding receptions, and it states perfectly the importance of food as part of the celebration. An Italian wedding reception frequently includes an elaborate meal lasting four hours or longer, and may involve up to fourteen individual courses. One of the final courses is the wedding cake, or zuppa inglese, which is a traditional Italian confection of tiers of pound cake filled with chocolate or vanilla custard, rum cream, and fruit, and trimmed with icing shaped like flowers.

During the reception, the groom’s tie can be cut into pieces and sold to provide honeymoon money for the happy couple. Many grooms will provide a duplicate tie or a tie from their bachelorhood for this custom.

Dancing is an integral part of any wedding celebration, and no Italian wedding would be complete without the traditional tarantella dance. Legend has it that a woman bitten by the poisonous tarantula can be cured by dancing at the proper tempo. Participants join hands to form a large circle, and begin dancing clockwise. As the tempo changes, the circle speeds up and changes direction, continuing faster and faster to see who can best keep up the frantic pace until finally even the best dancer succumbs to the laughter and confusion. This dance originated in southern Italy and today different regions of Italy use slightly different music for the tarantella, but the melodies are similar and include castanets or tambourines.

Many couples provide wedding favors, or bomboniera, to their guests, and candied almonds are the traditional favor in Italy. Small bundles (odd numbers like five or seven almonds are considered luckiest) are wrapped in tulle and tied with ribbon. White almonds are preferred because they represent purity, but colored almonds may be used to coordinate with the wedding colors. The sugar coating is symbolic of sweetness, and combined with the bitterness of the almond the confection represents the sweet and bitter sides of marriage.

When leaving the reception, the couple’s getaway car is decorated with flowers, especially the front grill and hood of the vehicle. This is believed to help pave the way for the couple to have a happy marriage.

A wedding is a celebration of family, romance, and unity. Many couples today make their weddings more personal and intimate by incorporating different cultural customs to honor their individual heritages. Italian weddings in particular are filled with traditions, from the initial serenading proposal to a unity candle during the Roman Catholic ceremony, to the boisterous tarantella dance after the elaborate reception meal. When meaningful customs are shared with family and friends they create a bond that strengthens the celebration, and the wedding day is even more joyous.