S/O Reception Before DW... Tacky Or Not???

Jetur20

I thought all the replies were amusing and wanted to know what you would think of my situation.

FI and I are getting married in Italy.  He is Italian and I am not; neither of us nor immediate family live in Italy, although he has a lot of extended family there.  We are inviting about 170 people, many of which are in Italy.  We expect to have around 100 people there.

However, as we are not having a Catholic wedding, we have to do a civil ceremony in order to make it official. In Bologna the only place to do that is in the town hall.  Now, you cannot reserve the town hall until you do all the paperwork, which we will not be able to do until late August (as an Italian citizen, FI has to wait 2 weeks for them to publish that he is getting married, etc.).  So basically we won't find out until the end of August what date we can have the official wedding.  We will only be in town for our Oct. 1 wedding for about 6 days (Sept. 28 - Oct. 3)

So while we are planning our "wedding" for Oct. 1 where my brother will "officiate" and we will do the whole walk down the aisle thing, we may not technically get married until Oct. 2 or 3 (although it's just as likely we do it Sept. 29 or 30).

So I may unintentionally end up having my "wedding" and reception before we are officially married.

Is this as bad as the St. Lucia thing? 

EDIT:  For what it's worth, FI and I live in Turkmenistan, so there is no way we can just do a JOP thing here before the ceremony to ensure we are married before.  And while we could invite people to the town hall official ceremony, it would be a tight fit for all our guests, and a civil wedding consists mostly of having the Italian Civil Code read and interpreted (since I don't know Italian), so it's not really something I care to have people see.

My brother is certified to marry people in CA and has done a few weddings, so although what he says won't be official, the ceremony will be very real in every other sense.  We are not referring to it as a vow renewal as it may be the same day of the wedding and I don't see the point, tbh.  The Italians will know it can't be real, and if the Americans don't, I'm not going to tell them otherwise.