Sitting behind a desk bearing a vast, cellophane-wrapped white bouquet sent to her by the couple she now refers to as Tom and Katie, Patrizia Riccioni can barely contain her excitement.
Riccioni, an architect and member of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, is a big fan of Tom Cruise. Her favourite film is Top Gun, which, she says, with a touch of Hollywood hyperbole, will ”remain in everyone’s hearts for ever”.
Since it became clear that the actor had chosen to marry Katie Holmes in Bracciano, the town of which Riccioni is mayor, she has become an even bigger fan. On Wednesday, she got to meet the bridegroom. ”He wanted to thank me,” she said in incredulous tones. ”I wanted to thank him!”
Other famous couples have wed at the 15th-century castle overlooking Lake Bracciano. Martin Scorsese and Isabella Rossellini began their short-lived partnership there in 1979. More recently, it was chosen for the marriage of the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour and the former United States state department spokesperson James Rubin, now a Sky TV pundit.
Thrilled
But never has this damp, scruffy little town north of Rome prepared to welcome such a list of celebrities as that drawn up for Saturday’s wedding. Isabella Uliano, whose shop sells confetti and party paraphernalia, said: ”You won’t find a single person here who is not thrilled that this is happening.”
Increasingly fevered reports from the capital have piled one glitzy name on another as the stars have jetted in. John Travolta is said to have landed his own plane at Ciampino airport on Friday with, reportedly, Steven Spielberg, among others, on board. The day before saw the arrivals of Jennifer Lopez, Jim Carrey and Brooke Shields.
None of which has done any harm to Rome’s hopes of relaunching itself as a city of celluloid. There are plans to lure the big production companies back to the Cinecitta studio complex. The blinding wall of flashlights that greeted the wedding couple and their baby daughter, Suri, when they went to dine at a restaurant near the Spanish Steps harked back to the 1960s when Rome was seen as ”Hollywood on the Tiber”.
Today, it is Bracciano which, in the words of its mayor — who really ought to consider an alternative career in cinema publicity — will be ”the centre of the attention of the world”.
On Friday, council workers were installing crash barriers in the square below the castle to deal with an estimated 30 000 onlookers.
Behind them, knots of thrilled schoolchildren were forming behind television reporters preparing to go live to New York, Paris and London. Supplies of bottled water and wine were being hauled up the 30m castle walls on ropes and taken in through the windows. As a helicopter circled the town, a gleaming people-carrier with darkened windows drove again and again through the narrow streets.
In the window of the Caffe del Castello was a photograph of the happy couple with the legend: ”Best wishes for your fairy tale.” Down a side street the Ristor-arte trattoria was offering fans a Tom Cruise set lunch for â,¬15.
In the words of a letter sent by the council to the town’s businesspeople, the wedding is an ”unrepeatable promotional opportunity”. At the Bar Roma, Daniela Venerucci said she had not seen any immediate benefit, ”but we’re hoping it’ll bring more tourism in the future”.
Others took a more short-term view. By midday, the price of a camera position overlooking the castle had risen to â,¬6 000.
Grazia Cencini, who owns a nearby hairdressing salon, said all she hoped for was ”that George Clooney has a hair out of place and needs to come in and get it fixed”. A client who was having a blow dry said: ”It’s quite unbelievable that stars like that are coming here.”
Incredible
And, indeed, it is all just a bit incredible. Bracciano may have one of the last privately owned — and therefore privately rentable — castles in Italy. It can offer liveried footmen, panelled ceilings, glittering chandeliers and even a ghost: that of Isabella dei Medici, a 16th-century mistress of the castle who is said to have disposed of her lovers by ushering them into a dark passage containing a well, at the bottom of which was an array of upturned swords.
But the town itself, under a flight path to Fiumicino airport, is visibly poor. Its unplastered grey stone walls are smothered with electricity cables, water pipes and clumps of weed that have taken root in the cracks.
So why did these wealthy Hollywood celebrities opt to come here for their wedding?
Yesterday’s Corriere della Sera newspaper put forward the theory that it was in Bracciano, during the filming of Mission Impossible 3, that Cruise and Holmes enjoyed what it delicately referred to as their ”first night of love”.
This seems unlikely, as the filming started in July 2005, by which time they had already been engaged for a month. However, in view of the fact that their daughter was born nine months later, it could just have been here that they had a more than usually decisive night of love. — Guardian Unlimited Â