An alternative wedding: 30 days to plan it from a van

Do you know anyone who organised their own wedding in a month and came out of it with a winning smile rather than a fairy tale in their hands?

Welcome to yet another one of our crazy ideas!

A step back

If I think back to when I was 10 years old, writing what was practically an essay in an old bank diary about how “my” big day would go, complete with details of the princess dress, it really makes me smile, a bit ironically. Cinderella has won out on plenty of other occasions, in plenty of other little girls’ bedrooms.

In our story, the ones who won were a woman and a man who believed in “a day all their own,” who chose the details without wanting to put on a show, but wanting to be themselves.

We’d been away from family for too long to allow ourselves to be anything but genuine, we’d been away from Italy for too long not to sit down at the table with our guests and enjoy some simple local dishes, we’d been away for too long to devote ourselves to too many people and miss the details of such an important shared moment.

But let’s take a step back a few months, to understand how a series of astonishing pieces fell into place to make those 24 hours unique and unrepeatable.

What on earth were we thinking?

It was 31 December 2022 when, maybe from a sudden touch of sunstroke or a bout of Stendhal syndrome in front of the Alcázar of Seville, Paolo asked me, smiling, to marry him.

It took me a second to realise that those two hazel eyes I’d been looking into every day for a while now were truly sincere, two seconds to smile, three seconds to answer yes without a shred of doubt.

That’s how Paolo and I are: we throw ideas and plans up in the air and then let things happen. That’s why, in the months that followed, we just laughed about this bizarre project, with flour on our noses and mouths full of bits of chocolate.

It was 18 May 2023 when, looking out over Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, watching our roots from afar under a generous downpour, we decided to contact the city of Turin to get married a couple of months later, a time when we’d definitely be passing through home. The reply from the offices was as quick as it was negative: there wouldn’t be enough time.

It’s not happening

Ah, time, that companion we’ve learned to handle in a completely different way since we set off (we talked about it here  ). What a mocking enemy. After a quarter of an hour of disappointment and silence, and a million things learned online about the bureaucracy needed to organise a wedding, we decided to try a side route: request the banns in Turin, our city of residence, and get married in a different town.

Which one? Good question. How much time did we have? Impossible to know.

At that point, the only email we got back said, roughly: “there’s no point calling or writing to chase this up, you’ll be contacted once your request has been taken on.”

It happened again

We’d just thrown a project up in the air, and things would go however they were meant to go.

So we didn’t tell anyone about our decision and kept living day by day without organising anything, letting time pass and making it as much of a friend as possible.

We caught a ferry, came back to our continent, crossed Spain following in Don Quixote’s footsteps, and arrived in our beloved France.

Getting married wouldn’t change anything between us, but it would help us feel more protected should we need it, always living “alone” in the middle of the world.

Dream or… I’m getting married!

It was 22 July 2023, and while I was sending off the email to renew my ID card and it was pouring outside after days of unbearable heat, a strange reply arrived summoning us to the town hall in Turin on 27 July to officially file the marriage banns. Well, we were across the Alps, we had a pain au chocolat (diary in Italian) right in front of us, and tears were streaming down as fast as the rain. Our fingers moved just as quickly. We urgently had to call our parents to break the news and find someone to act on our behalf at the town hall, reply to the email and let them know we’d be delegating someone, find a town with an available date, work out the guest list and figure out where to gather everyone for a moment that was unmistakably, unmistakably us.

By the end of the evening we’d sorted almost everything out, against all odds.

The next day, while out walking with Sakè, I picked a few wildflowers and put together a little bouquet, then with Olimpia’s tail wagging beside us, Paolo and I hugged each other in front of the van, surrounded by the Alps. We were home. We are, everywhere.

We got back to Italy in early August, living every minute that mocking old friend, time, gave us.

The days went by, and we ticked things off our list.

By the time we reached Saluzzo, a dress I’d ordered online was waiting for me, which, much to my joy, was two sizes wrong. Thanks to technology, easy returns and express delivery, while we were busy insulating the van and sorting out everything that months of life between Europe and Africa had put through the wringer on board, another dress arrived at the house, and this time it really was the perfect one: a lightly worked bodice and a floor-length skirt, simple but radiant, that let me feel not so much like a princess, but like myself.

In those days we got to hug family and friends again, meet the owner of the mountain lodge where we’d host about thirty guests for an intimate ceremony, taste the cake that would delight everyone, find the right charity project to give meaning to our wedding favours, and order a simple bouquet that wouldn’t make me sneeze.

Wooden tables decked out with wildflowers and dishes cooked with love by the wonderful staff at Pian Munè (diary in Italian), the Leonardo Cake (diary in Italian) with chocolate and raspberries, and the wedding favours — I’ll tell you all about them in dedicated posts here on our site, because every single detail that made our day truly unique deserves its own story.

Live a life you can recognise yourself in

It was 25 August when we parked in the courtyard of Paolo’s parents’ house and gave a thorough clean to the van that would drive me to the town hall and be our home for our first night as a married couple. I remember every single moment with joy, with an emotion I’ll carry in my heart forever.

Here’s an excerpt of what I wrote for our guests:

There’s a line from Tiziano Terzani that seems to sum up what we live through, every day, on our skin: “Live a life in which you can recognise yourself.”

Well, we like to imagine we’ve recognised ourselves in the people who brought us into this world, in those who grew up alongside us, in those who saw our first smiles, in those whose paths crossed ours, in those who arrived day after day and never left, in those who simply passed through and still left their mark.

We like to imagine we recognise ourselves in the scent of a flower, in the beat of a butterfly’s wings, in the taste of a simple dish cooked with love, in the rhythm of a song, in the vastness of a horizon, in the echo of a wave that comes and goes.

We like to imagine we recognise ourselves in a fleeting shadow. In a footprint barely pressed into damp sand. In a silent face glimpsed for just a moment in the middle of a noisy crowd. We like to imagine that one day we’ll be able to recognise, in ourselves, the mark of this world we feel we’re a part of.

We like the idea of being able to recognise ourselves in a life that might seem strange, different, but that for us is simply reality.

It makes us smile to think we can recognise ourselves in the small, everyday gestures: passing each other a pair of socks when the house is cold, warning each other when it starts to rain, pointing out to one another what deserves to be looked at.

We like to imagine we can recognise ourselves in a laugh that comes straight from the heart, in the hint of a smile, in a knowing look.

Paolo and I truly recognised ourselves in each other that day, so simple yet so special.

A 26th of August in which every kind of weather kept us company, moving from city to mountains, as if every corner of the world was by our side that day too.

We recognised ourselves in the smiles, in a tumble down the slide, in tears of emotion, in the polenta dinner at the end of the day, in a game of Carcassonne with whoever stayed with us until the very end, in the coffee on board the van the next morning, imagining rainbows of possibility wrapped in fog.

And we’re ready to recognise ourselves in a life we’re building to measure, day after day, kilometre after kilometre, in an everyday existence that’s entirely our own but in which we manage to express ourselves with joy, in a job we’re inventing as we go but that we hope will bring us great satisfaction.

Thank you for reading this outpouring of emotion. That day we didn’t want a stranger photographer among us; we asked friends and family to take some pictures, and we happily collected whatever their eyes managed to capture. What came out of it are photos we love and a video that we hope conveys at least a hint of the emotion we felt!