Carriage, Four Horses and Wonderland Costumes: A Getty Wedding in Scicli

A carriage left Palazzo Favacchio pulled by four horses and made its way to the church of San Michele Arcangelo, along a street lined with figures in fairy-tale dress. Waiting on via Francesco Mormina Penna, Ragusa News reported, were a White Rabbit, a Mad Hatter and a Queen of Hearts — characters borrowed from Alice in Wonderland — and among them at least one man in a white rabbit costume.

The couple were Anna Getty and Robert Getty, described by Ragusa News as two foreign spouses who had chosen the Sicilian town for an Orthodox rite at San Michele Arcangelo, a church whose facade looks onto the same street. Ragusa Oggi reports that an Orthodox priest celebrated the ceremony and that the day was kept in white and blue. Guests who had come from around the world were received afterwards at the nearby Palazzo Bonelli Patanè. The Ragusa Oggi headline adds that the Princes of Greece were also arriving; the portion of that article available offers no further detail, so the attendance should be treated as unconfirmed.

Ragusa News describes Anna Getty as a Russian model published by Vogue who has walked for Dolce & Gabbana. Robert Getty is called a "pronipote" of the oilman and philanthropist Paul Getty (1892–1976) — a term that can mean great-nephew or great-grandson, and which the Italian text leaves unresolved; the Getty name is also carried by the museum in Los Angeles. The couple had a child in 2025, and one Ragusa News sentence, cut off mid-word, places the boy's baptism in the Hamptons, in New York, in the presence of the Greek royal family. The baptism detail rests on an incomplete sentence.

For via Mormina Penna the occasion was briefly a spectacle. Ragusa News reported that a musical group greeted the wedding carriage by striking up Lucio Battisti's "Il mio canto libero" as the street filled with tourists the paper described as incredulous and happy.

What remains is the pairing of things that do not usually share a street: four horses and a wedding carriage in a Sicilian lane, a man dressed as the White Rabbit among the guests, and Lucio Battisti playing as the carriage passed.