The church doors swung open and the newlyweds emerged into the afternoon heat beneath a shower of rice and the ringing of bells.

Forty paces away, five young musicians stood against the ancient stone wall of the piazza.

Four drummer boys and a piccolo.

They were impossibly handsome. Young, dark-haired and brown-skinned, dressed in white shirts, black trousers and polished black shoes. They stood in a neat row, looking rather more serious than the occasion required.

I fall in love too easily.

As the bride and groom stepped into the sunlight, the drummers raised their sticks.

The first strike seemed to shake the whole piazza.

Then the piccolo began.

A bright, piercing melody rose above the deep thunder of the drums, slipping between the old buildings and disappearing somewhere among the terracotta roofs. The five boys played without looking at the wedding guests. They simply stood there and played, as though the music belonged to them and we had merely been permitted to hear it.

I watched them.

I knew nothing about them.

Not their ages, where they lived, what they did when they weren’t playing at weddings. I didn’t even know their names.

And yet, for those few minutes, I loved them.

When the music ended, the bells suddenly seemed very loud.

The boys lowered their instruments. There was no bow, no waiting for applause. They simply turned and walked away, disappearing into a narrow alley beside the church.

As they went, one loosened his black tie. Another rolled up his sleeves. One of the drummers said something that made the others laugh.

And that was all.

They vanished into the old town, five young Italians swallowed by the afternoon.

I stood there for a moment longer.

It seemed terribly unfair that people could enter your life so completely and then disappear from it without ever knowing they had been there.

I would never see them again.

I would never know their names.

But for a few minutes in a sunlit piazza, four drummer boys and a piccolo had made me fall in love.

I took out my notebook.

I wrote only six words:

four drummer boys and a piccolo.