The countdown is on.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes arrived in Rome Monday, well before their scheduled Saturday wedding in Italy, reports said.
The impending newlyweds were reportedly accompanied by family, including Cruise's two oldest children and the formerly mysterious Cruise-Holmes newborn, Suri.
An email to Cruise's publicist seeking confirmation of the actor's travel itinerary, as well as other reputed wedding details, offered no additional clues. "We are not commenting on any wedding details at this time," replied rep Arnold Robinson on Monday.
Fortunately for people who live for nuptial news, the world press isn't nearly as discreet.
Some of its recent dispatches about the pending Cruise-Holmes vows:
- Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli will sing "Ave Maria" at the traditional Scientology ceremony.
- Traditional Scientology vows go something like this (per various accounts), "Now, Tom, girls need clothes and food and tender happiness and frills—a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat... Do you then provide? Do you?"
- And they also go like this (per the New York Times), "Hear well, sweet Katie, for promise binds. Young men are free and may forget."
- Should Cruise, a longtime Scientologist, not forget Saturday's ceremony, said ceremony will reportedly be held be at a castle at Lake Bracciano in Central Italy.
- Odescalchi (said castle) was built in the 15th century. It has a private chapel, 12 halls and 300 parking spaces. It is believed the parking spaces weren't added until at least the 16th century.
- Per the castle's official Website, constructed sometime after the 1800s, a ceremony at Odescalchi "unfolds with refined and somber elegance."
- Holmes' Giorgio Armani-designed gown is "floaty," according to the New York Daily News.
- Cruise's Giorgio Armani-designed tuxedo is presumed to be black.
- Guests will number in the hundreds, among them Hollywood's Scientology elite, including John Travolta, wife Kelly Preston and former bikini-model Kirstie Alley.
- Perhaps most notable among the uninvited is Oprah Winfrey, who has revealed she isn't on the guest list, even if it was she who gave Cruise the forum last year to declare his love for Holmes in a big, couch-jumping way. "I don't get invited to everyone's wedding," the talk queen reminded Extra, adding she still intended to gift the happy couple.
Cruise, the world's biggest movie star, and Holmes, the former Dawson's Creek series regular, became engaged atop the Eiffel Tower in June 2005, a mere two months after their first meeting.
The wedding is to be the third for Cruise, 44, and the first for Holmes, 27.