My Wedding Day with Sinead Culbert: 'We left 40 Irish, English and Dutch people in a wine bar in Rome'

Our 40 guests flew over and stayed for the guts of a week. We didn’t demand they do that, but a lot of people made a little holiday out of it.

We got married in this stunning Catholic church called San Silvestro in the old part of Rome, the historic centre.

It’s really stunning — the altar is designed by Michelangelo, and it’s a very small church but really atmospheric and beautiful. The funny thing though was the priest was the spitting image of Bertie Ahern. It was the most bizarre thing. He was Irish and lived in Rome. But yeah, it looks like Bertie Ahern married us.

Planning the wedding was an experience, we had some funny situations along the way. For my wedding dress, I wanted a very sleek, straight, elegant dress. I picked my wedding dress in the first 20 minutes, but the thing was, it was a showroom dress. 

So the shop said their dressmaker would make another version of that dress. But then every time I went for a fitting, the dress got bigger and bigger and bigger. By visit four, I was like a meringue! Turns out the dressmaker had left and they didn’t know how to recreate the dress.

I ended up taking the showroom dress, which wasn’t finished so I got it fixed up ever so slightly. On the wedding day, though, one of my shoulder straps came off — there are photographs of my mother sewing up my strap.

Myself and Rogier had gone over to Rome in mid-summer to do our research. We were walking around the historic part of Rome, looking for a restaurant that could sit 40 people and as we were looking at one restaurant, I backed into another one and fell down two steps into it. Lo and behold, it turns out that it is the oldest wine bar in Rome called L’Antica Enoteca.

They never have Irish weddings there. The only reason we got it was the Italian guy who ran it — his name was Atilio — was married to a Dutch woman and he loved Dutch people. He was obsessed with my husband, not in a sexual way! Well maybe, I’m not sure. But we used whatever currency we had.

That’s the thing about having a wedding in Rome. They’re so relaxed about everything. They don’t believe in organisation. Atilio kept saying to us, ‘you can have anything’. I kept saying ‘that’s great but can you put it in an email?’. And he was like ‘no, no, no, for you, it is in my heart’. Honestly, I wasn’t able to sleep at night.

Every couple of weeks before the wedding, I’d ring him up and say ‘hi Atilio, it’s Sinead from Ireland’. And he’d say ‘who?’. And I’d remind him about my Dutch husband. And then he’d remember. We ended up going to Rome a week early so that we could make sure Atilio remembered who we were. And, in fairness, he had
everything in order for our wine reception on the day.

On the morning of the wedding myself and my sisters, who were my bridesmaids, were getting our hair done.

A friend of mine, who’s Italian, had warned me to be very straight with the hairdresser about what we wanted because Italian hairdressers all love big hair.

Needless to say, we weren’t able to be forceful and we went in like a wedding group, and came out like Whitesnake. We all just let ourselves be turned into an 80s rock group!

Back at the hotel my mother fixed our hair for us. She straightened out my hair and my two sisters had to pin back theirs because it was so big we couldn’t bring it down.

I hate keeping people waiting on the photographs so after the church, we brought our guests straight to the wine bar.

We had the champagne reception and lots of wines, and then Rogier and myself jumped into the car and the photographer brought us to all Rome’s historic sites for our photos.

Meanwhile, we left 40 Irish, English and Dutch people in a wine bar. By the time we got back, let’s just say everyone could speak fluent Dutch, even my 101-year-old grandmother.

After the wine reception, we walked down the streets to the restaurant. What we didn’t realise about Rome is, if you get married there and walk down the streets in your wedding dress, everybody starts clapping. So as we walked along, it was like something from a movie.

It was beautiful. We made our way the restaurant, which was called the Three Sisters (in Italian). It was a high-end gourmet restaurant, with really good food, and we’d hired the whole place out.

Our guests were all so different but all very dynamic, and they got on so well together. There was so much chatter and sing-songs in the restaurant rather than dancing. You could see the poor Italian people who owned the restaurant were traumatised by the whole thing, but I think in a positive way. It was a magical experience.

Tickets for Sinead Culbert’s stand-up tour A Work in Progress are available on sineadculbert.com 

and her podcast Dangerous Irish Women is on dangerousirishwomen.com.