General Information about Item:
- Customary Folklore: Rituals, Traditions
- English
- Italy
Informant Data:
- Damiano Benvegnu was born in 1977 in a tiny town called Albergo, which is located in the Dolomites region in the northeastern Italian Alps. He spent most of his childhood living in Turkey and Algeria, but he returned to live in Italy at the age of 10. He is currently an Italian professor at Dartmouth College. He has attended 5-10 Italian weddings.
Contextual Data:
- Social/Cultural Context: In Italian weddings, the guests meet the couple outside the church after the ceremony. At this time, it is traditional to throw rice, or coriandoli (confetti) as the couple leaves the church in celebration.
Item:
- At Italian weddings, as the couple was exiting the church, the guests used to throw pieces of rice as a celebration of the couple’s union. This was meant to symbolize prosperity, with the amount of rice thrown thought to equal the amount of money that a couple would acquire throughout their life. Nowadays, people tend to throw “coriandoli” (which is what Americans call confetti), in order to preserve pigeon welfare.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Transcript of Associated File:
- “Yes, we do throw rice when the wife and the husband leave the church. Now we don’t do it anymore – at least we try to avoid it for pigeon welfare, or whatever... I think it’s uh… it means prosperity… If I’m not mistaken it’s as much – it’s the amount of money that you will receive in your life, throughout your life.”
- “People throw what you in the US call confetti, which in Italian is coriandoli, so they are just pieces of paper… but we use them for carnivals.”
Informant’s Comments:
- The informant believes that the amount of rice you throw is supposed to symbolize the amount of money that the couple will have throughout their life time.
Collector’s Comments:
- Rice symbolizes prosperity because historically the wealth of landowners in a rural society was measured in foodstuffs like rice. Professor Benvegnu mentioned that he is from a rural area, and it is natural that people in such a setting would associate rice with wealth. It could also be that the guest throw rice at the couple to signify that they will never go hungry as a result of poverty; food will always be in plentiful supply. This is an example of a superstition – the more rice thrown, the more wealth the couple will have.
Collector’s Name: Isabella Florissi, Peter Loomis and Katie Toal
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