I’ll admit it: I’m wedding-phobic. I have nothing against marriage. It’s the shower-gown-gift registry-bouquet-cake nightmare that freaks me out…probably because I was one of the last of my friends actually to take the plunge, so I had a front-row seat as they went through it first.

There was my friend Melanie, who was only allowed to invite eight of her own friends to her wedding — because the rest of the 182 guests were her father’s business associates. As he so tenderly put it, “I’m the one paying for this damn thing!”

And my friend Jessica, who registered for eight place settings of (frankly, hideous) Limoges china at $1000 a set — and, much to her chagrin, received a total of three “finger bowls.”

Somewhere between hijacked guest lists and unrequited gift requests, love was getting lost.

And those weren’t the only things giving me jitters: During one fateful get-together with my future in-laws, I literally broke out in hives. (Suffice it to say my husband’s family is staunchly conservative, whereas members of mine have been known to frequent antiwar rallies.) I tried so hard to bite my tongue when politics came up, I actually got splotches the ER doctor called “the worst case of nonallergic hives” she’d ever seen. A shot of prednisone later, I was thinking that putting all of our parents in the same room might not make for what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life. A mutual college friend came to the rescue one night when he said, offhand, “If I ever get married, I’ll elope.”

In the next breath, he mentioned his friend who had a country house in Italy he could “borrow” anytime. Elope? Why didn’t I think of that? Note to anyone else allergic to nuptials: Eloping’s not easy. There were stacks of bilingual paperwork to fill out, and the “free” country house was taken that week, so we rented our own place in the beautiful Italian Riviera town of Diano San Pietro. But that only set us back $500 — thankfully, our elopement was “off-peak.”

At first, the town’s mayor was reluctant to marry any couple from such a divorce-prone nation. “Why can’t you get married in Las Vegas, like normal Americans?” he asked. The fact that our ceremony took place on April Fool’s Day, with me in a black-and-white Bill Blass cocktail dress my husband serendipitously brought home from Saks one day (instead of a virginal white gown), was taken as further affront to the sacred rites of matrimony. But with the help of my impromptu maid of honor — our sweet 80-year-old landlady — and a college friend who spoke enough Italian to convince the mayor that, no, we weren’t in jest, at 9 a.m. on April 1, we were married. (It had to be that early because the mayor was also the town’s soccer coach, and the team had practice at 10.) Upon our return, some friends couldn’t process such a departure from tradition: No obligatory diamond solitaire? No bachelor party? No strippers!? (This from a male friend robbed of his role as groomsman.) But we were happy to trade all that for what we did get — a bridal wreath of garlic flowers made by the local children, which materialized outside our door on our wedding day; his-and-hers slippers hung for luck overnight outside our rental house by villagers unknown; the raucous wedding breakfast we hosted for what seemed to be the entire village of Diano San Pietro (population: 1022) in the restaurant across the street from the town hall, which opened especially for us; and the moonlit serenade beneath our bedroom window that evening — courtesy of the soccer team.

In the end, we managed to make our wedding day about us — our commitment to one another — and us alone. Which was exactly what we wanted.

Meg Cabot is a best-selling author of books for teens and adults. Her most recent Princess Diaries novel —Princess in Training — is in bookstores now. Also look for Cabot’s adult novel,Every Boy’s Got One, based on her Italian elopement. Visit her online at megcabot.com.eloped.