In Puglia, especially in the area around Bari, when a couple goes to visit (an announced and not occasional visit) to a newlywed couple married recently, if you go to visit them for the first time after their marriage, the hosts tend, inevitably, to carry out, in order, four specific tasks:
1) show the house,
2) offer sweets and liqueurs,
3) show the photo album of their wedding,
4) show the video of their wedding.
1) show the house: this guided tour, formally, occurs for give a sign of friendliness to the guests, but, in reality, it also has the fundamental intent to display to the guests one's wealth and obtain a corresponding social and economic recognition.
It is a sort of procession, which starts from the kitchen room and that, through the bedrooms and the main bathroom, has end (inexplicably) in the second small bathroom, where even the prolonged observation of the toilet bowl, of the washing machine and of the underwear hung out to dry, is a moment of deep reflection architectural and philosophical (it should be noted that the house of a resident of the area of Bari you leave show because, inevitably, more cleaner and more orderly of the operating room of a Scandinavian hospital).
It is absolutely necessary, for the visitors, linger long enough in every room, without hastening the visit (slowness is very much appreciated!), and setting out, for each room, a question or a remark in order to provide the owners the pretext of enunciate a original quality of the room itself.
2) offer sweets and liqueurs: this second stage of the ritual is the most pleasant, because sweets and liqueurs are produced strictly handmade and of the highest quality.
It should, however, be very cautious in accepting and very slow in the eating and the drinking these foods: in fact, if you eat and drink quickly, the hosts will not have hesitation to fill again the glass and the tray, and you may find, after a few minutes, completely drunk and with a some thousand calories in addition, on him (for dispose this calories, you'll have to run a dozen marathons).
3) show the photo album of their marriage: with this third phase, we enter the red zone, in the minefield.
In fact, any reasonable pair of newlyweds plan to keep a dozen photographs of his marriage, to frame a couple of these and leave it in the drawer all the others.
Conversely, the newlyweds of Puglia, in this regard, with a pathological megalomania, spend a fortune to get a many hundred photographs of their wedding, which then will be placed in an album (album bigger than a square and heavier than a anvil).
Even here, the guests have the ethical duty to linger appropriately on each photo: do not want never God that the guests attempt to accelerate the vision, because, immediately, the hosts would be offended very seriously!
Whereas that an album of this type consists of about two hundred photos, and considering an minimum observation of ten seconds per photo, the guests will discharge their moral duties in no less than half an hour.
And you two do not be optimistic illusions because it will never be lacking the following photographs:
a) she who, accompanied by her father, leaves his horrible condominium of social housing, going through a horrendous door in anticorrosive material,
b) the car park which is on the back of the church,
c) the launch of the doves (of those that remain still alive, after spending a few hours locked in a basket),
d) he and she that embrace the well (that is located on the back of the church),
e) the groom who seeks anxiously his wife (wife which remains hidden behind a hedge).
4) show the video of their wedding: if the guests are survivors at the previous three stages, the final test awaits them.
This last test will decide if the guests can be considered, by the hosts, best friends for eternity, or if, vice versa, will be relegated to a slow but inexorable oblivion.
This type of film never lasts less than 30/40 minutes, and, not surprisingly, there were many cases in which the male component of the pair of guests, in order to not to bring any psychiatric injury disabling of permanent nature, was forced to adopt one of the following evasive tactics:
a) pretend to be called, on the mobile phone, from its terrible Chief Office or from a very wealthy and important customer,
b) simulate an intestinal colic and shut himself up for a short break in the bathroom,
c) put on reading glasses, with superimposed the realistic drawings of the eyeballs, for doze for a few minutes.
In conclusion, therefore, a single warning: if a jovial pair of newlyweds of Puglia invites you to their home, you two you will not have to overcome their door!!! :-))
