Stars descend on Rome for TomKat’s wedding
From Marta Falconi

ROME—Celebrities began arriving in Rome on Thursday for Tom Cruise’s wedding to actress Katie Holmes this weekend in Italy, feeding a media frenzy.
Jim Carrey, Jennifer Lopez, Jada Pinkett Smith and “Mission: Impossible III” director J.J. Abrams were among the first guests of the showbusiness wedding to land at Rome’s Ciampino airport, witnesses said.
Cruise and Holmes later arrived at a central Rome restaurant for a party for some 130 guests, waving and acknowledging throngs of cheering fans for the first time since their arrival.
The couple and their guests were choosing from a menu featuring 12 dishes of mostly traditional Italian home-style cooking such as ravioli with meat sauce and artichokes prepared Roman-style.
Some 500 people, including David Beckham and his wife Victoria, are expected to attend the ceremony on Saturday at a medieval castle in the lakeside town of Bracciano, around 40 km (25 miles) north of the Italian capital.
“We are very excited for Tom and Katie,” Martin Holmes, the bride’s father, told Sky Italia television on arrival at the airport.
His wife Kathleen declined to give any details about her 27-year-old daughter’s wedding dress, which has been designed by Giorgio Armani. Actress Brooke Shields, who had a public spat with 44-year-old Cruise last year after he criticized her for taking medication to treat post-natal depression, also arrived in Rome on Thursday for the wedding.
Cruise and Holmes, stalked by paparazzi who are besieging their hotel in central Rome, made their first public appearance in the city late on Wednesday, when they sneaked out with their baby daughter Suri to attend a dinner with the mayor of Rome.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes will likely wed Saturday in a Scientology ceremony held at a 15th-century Italian castle in a lakeside town near Rome, the town’s mayor said Thursday. The wedding party, along with guests, are then expected to attend a banquet the same day in Rome, Bracciano Mayor Patrizia Riccioni said.
For weeks rumors have focused on Odescalchi Castle in the sleepy town of Bracciano as the likely venue for the celebrity wedding. Riccioni told a news conference Thursday she had met the couple the day before somewhere outside of her town, but she would not say where.
She was coy about other details, too, saying only that she expected the couple to arrive Saturday morning at the castle, which overlooks Lake Bracciano, for what she believed would be a Scientology wedding ceremony, followed by a banquet. She said she expected the couple to return to the Italian capital the same day. Cruise and Holmes have been staying this week at a luxury hotel near the Spanish Steps in Rome.
“I want to thank Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes for choosing this venue for such an important event,” Riccioni said. While she stopped short of confirming the actual date of the wedding, the town’s Web site late Thursday had a picture of Cruise and Holmes under the headline, “The wedding of the year in Bracciano, Saturday, 18 November 2006.”
Scientology ceremonies contain many elements of traditional weddings — rings, procession, vows, etc. But they also include certain Scientology fundamentals, including vowing to never to go to bed without communicating about any differences. They also stress the Scientology tenet known as ARC — A for affinity, the closeness between a couple; R for reality, what a couple agrees on; C for communication, the exchange of ideas and thoughts.
In the Italian capital, meanwhile, Cruise and Holmes held a dinner at a small restaurant near the Spanish Steps, drawing several hundred fans and curious people hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars. The area immediately surrounding Nino restaurant was cordoned off, and private security officials crowded the area.
The restaurant owner’s daughter, Francesca Luti, told TG Sky 24 news channel that Cruise was “a regular,” and that the evening’s menu included some of the actor’s favorite dishes — gnocchi, several types of pasta, ravioli with truffles and artichokes.
Those spotted going into the restaurant included “Mission Impossible III” director, J.J. Abrams, Brooke Shields and Jennifer Lopez. Lopez’s husband, singer Marc Anthony, briefly stepped out to smoke a cigarette.
Bracciano’s mayor said she had given the couple a small silver sculpture of the castle as a gift, and photographs posted on the town’s Web site late Thursday showed it was engraved with the word Bracciano and Saturday’s date. The congratulatory card that went with it read: “A sincere note in sign of gratitude from the city of Bracciano, for having chosen it as the place where to crown your dream of love.” Riccioni said she would like to give them honorary citizenship “because they have brought so much to our little village.”
“When we met, they seemed to me to be far more normal people than what I believed. I think all this secrecy depends on them wanting to keep their marriage private and intimate,” the mayor said, sparking laughter in the room filled with the journalists who have been trying for days to find clues about how the wedding will be held.
The Hollywood stars’ late-Wednesday visit to Rome City Hall caused a flurry of speculation that they were getting a marriage license, but the city hall said Thursday it was only a courtesy visit to the mayor, a big movie buff. As of midday Thursday, the Bracciano Town Hall was insisting it had not received any request to celebrate the wedding, but preparations for a party appeared to be under way at the castle.
The Bracciano Town Hall said, however, that the mayor would not need much time to prepare for a civil ceremony if the necessary papers were presented before Saturday. To obtain a marriage license, U.S. citizens planning to marry in Italy must present specific documents — including their passports, birth certificates and an affidavit that there is no impediment to their marriage. Because the documents need to be translated into Italian and certified, the process is generally time consuming.