How to Crash an Italian Wedding
- jasey5
- Jul 13
- 6 min read
After spending 3.5 weeks in fairly chilly Norway, it was time for a big climate switch up. It took most of a day of planes, trains and automobiles to get from Norway down to Southern Germany to spend a holiday weekend with some good family friends. They were incredible hosts and I don’t think I stopped grinning for the entire weekend. Germany in June was perfect. Hot sunny days, long evenings and food growing everywhere. There were fruit trees all over and gardens galore and cherries. I’ve discovered cherries make for even slower hiking than huckleberries. It seems a lot of cherry trees were planted years ago and many of them produce so much that no one seems to mind if you help yourself to a few handfuls while you explore.
The friends I was visiting are two families who live near Stuttgart, Germany. My dad knows one of them, Stefan, from when he studied abroad at CU Boulder many years ago. They have stayed friends through occasional hiking treks in the alps and we did a trip with him and his wife, Anja, a few years ago. Through them, we met Marita and Martin and their two daughters, Franzi and Isi.
After getting picked up in Stefan’s old Saab convertible, we spent our first evening in Martin’s amazing garden eating a lovely meal and playing spike ball. Then around 10pm it started getting dark and I got super confused. Having always lived in places where it gets dark it seems unremarkable, but after having not experienced full darkness for weeks in Norway I got seriously thrown for a loop. I think having it get dark again might have actually been weirder than it not getting dark in Norway. Here’s the short list of things I noticed: First my eyes didn’t know what to do. I swear my eyes were a little jittery and my vision wasn’t that good. Probably not all that different from trying to see things at night normally but l’d totally forgotten what it felt like. Then I realized I hadn’t really seen the stars for weeks and strangest of all, it started getting chilly. I hadn’t realized in Norway that because the sun doesn’t set for long the temperature doesn’t really change much throughout the day. I pretty much wore the same outfit from the time I got up till the time I went to bed. Suddenly in Germany, it was hot during the day and chilly at night and I had to start changing my outfit throughout the day again. Wack.
During the weekend, they took me on a lovely bike ride featuring a swim, a picnic and ice cream, then a hike to a castle featuring another picnic and a swim. Seeing a pattern yet? Finally, on the last day, Stefan had a family reunion and invited me to tag along. So I ended up meeting his extended family, taking a boat ride across Lake Constance and going for a swim and eating more ice cream. For those of you wondering, yes, I apparently like ice cream now. I’m still working out how that happened.
With the weekend coming to a close, I took off for the first solo section of my trip which mainly consisted of figuring out how to get myself from Germany to Albania in 6 days via Switzerland and Italy. Because I will be returning to Switzerland for the end of my trip, I made only brief stops in Lucerne and Lugano on my way to Milan, Italy. I spent the vast majority of my time in Milan walking and after about 79,000 steps in three days I feel like I saw quite a bit of the city. Let’s start with their crazy gothic cathedral, which my tour guide would like you to know took way longer than the infamous Spanish Sagrada Família - which has been under construction since 1882 - to build. The incredibly massive and intricate Duomo Cathedral started construction in 1386 and was finished in ……. 1965. That’s 579 years in the making. Can you imagine the number of generations of builders who left their mark on this building? Very impressive.
Along with the very old buildings, Milan also has a very beautiful newer town, complete with a few buildings totally covered in trees. Overall, Milan managed an impressive amount of greenery on balconies, which I really enjoyed. Despite my enjoyment of the nature in the city though, Milan managed to be by far the place on my trip where I felt the most out of place. This was 1000% my fault as I packed my backpack mainly concerned about having the right outdoor gear and forgetting city wear. Milan, which is well known for its fashion, was quite the well-dressed city and I have never identified more with being a Boulderite than walking to the train station through the fashion district of Milan in 2-toned, Norwegian hiking pants, purple hiking boots, an osprey backpack complete with trekking poles in the pocket, a worn out Audubon Society baseball cap and a pair of scratched, reflective outdoorsy sunglasses, which would be more likely to be sexy to a dragonfly than a human. I felt like I was committing a fashion crime on the level of walking through Paris in ratty PJs. But hey, at least no one looked at me and thought, “ah yes, this is the person in this city worth pickpocketing.”
My next stop was the Adriatic beach town of Rimini, which is along a 25 mile stretch of uninterrupted wide sandy beach with an uninterrupted line of thousands of beach umbrellas. I made friends with a couple of British girls in the hostel and joined them for a day trip to the 5th smallest country in the world: San Marino. It is completely surrounded by Italy and survived and defended its independence for hundreds of years partly thanks to the impressive fortress on a small mountain in the center of the country, from which you can see the whole country.
After Rimini, my last Italian stop was the port town of Bari. Old town Bari was my first introduction to the medieval old towns featured in many later stops on my trip. These old towns are mostly built from stone and feature super narrow streets without cars and lots of tables spilling out of restaurants into the squares and streets. I almost missed my walking tour because the street where we met was so covered in tables I thought it was a restaurant.
My favorite stop on my tour was the church of St. Nicholas, where 60% of the remains of the Saint behind modern day Santa Claus are kept. The rest of his remains are in Venice because both cities stole what they could of his remains from his initial resting place in Turkey. That’s not why it was my favorite stop however. The church was open to the public and our guide ushered us inside, where to my surprise, a wedding was taking place. A small wedding party was seated wearing their finest near the front of the church and the back of the church was full of tourists milling around. The ceremony wrapped up as we watched and everyone filed outside to watch the couple exit the church in their finery. Rice and flowers were thrown, cameras flashed and wedding guests and tourists alike cheered for the couple. I found the whole experience very fun but quite odd as it seemed like a major invasion of the wedding’s privacy; but when I asked our guide about it, she said that it is normal for weddings in this church and it is just part of the experience. St. Nick is also the patron saint of girls wanting to get married, so if you want to crash an Italian wedding or are hoping for a wedding of your own, you know the church to go to. There are weddings there nearly every day in summer…
Before I sign off, I must leave you with one final punch line. I got pasta scammed. In Italy. There’s a famous street in Bari where women make and sell handmade orecchiette pasta. I bought some on a side street nearby thinking it would be cheaper and less aimed at the tourists so maybe more authentic. Oh how wrong I was. As I was sitting eating my lunch in a square at the end of this street, a tour came by and stopped a few feet away. The guide began to explain that this is the phony pasta street because while the women are making pasta by hand they are not selling the pasta they make. Instead, they are selling factory made pasta. Then he gestured in my direction and said ‘that lady just bought factory made pasta’ and then continued his tour. Ouch! I will have you know however, that I may have been fooled, but for $2.92, I got some of the best pasta I’ve ever had AND a story! So maybe I’m the one who scammed the system :)
