Cruise arrives in Rome ahead of wedding
Showbiz Desk

ROME—Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise was in Rome ahead of his weekend wedding to US actress Katie Holmes at a 12th-century castle on Lake Bracciano near the Italian capital. He flew in to Rome’s Ciampino airport from California aboard a private jet with an entourage of 10 people, airport sources said.
Cruise, 44, and Holmes, 27, one of Hollywood’s most visible couples, will tie the knot Saturday at the Odescalchi Castle, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) outside Rome. The ANSA news agency said Cruise joined his fiancee at Rome’s Hassler Villa Medici, but the five-star hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps denied the report when contacted.
About 100 people — including police, paparazzi, a few diehard fans but mainly tourists attracted by the swelling crowd — had gathered outside the hotel by the early evening.
An excited group of five South Korean tourists craned their necks for a sighting of the star. “I like his movies very much,” said Keunwan Lee, a 27-year-old management student from Daegu, ticking off “Top Gun” and “Mission: Impossible” as favourites.
But Krista Campbell of Toronto, Canada, was less enthusiastic. “There’s too much on the news about it all the time,” she told AFP. Rooms at the Hassler start at 500 euros (640 dollars) a night, while the penthouse presidential suite costs 3,200 euros.
Cruise and Holmes announced their engagement in June 2005 in Paris, less than three months after being spotted together in Italy. He famously rhapsodized about Holmes during an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s hit television talk show, jumping up and down on her sofa for emphasis. The couple’s daughter Suri was born on April 18 in the United States.
It will be Holmes’s first marriage and the third for Cruise, who was married between 1987 and 1990 to actress Mimi Rogers and from 1990 to 2001 to Australian film goddess Nicole Kidman, with whom he adopted two children.