Italy’s first openly lesbian MP, Paola Concia, married in Frankfurt Friday, the first time an Italian politician has married someone of the same sex. Concia, gay spokesperson for the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), exchanged vows with Ricarda Trautmann, a criminologist from Cologne, Germany. Concia said she would have tied the knot “sooner” but a “pile” of documents from her previous marriage, to a man, had been buried in 2009’s devastating earthquake in L’Aquila.

“Unlike others I want to get married,” Concia announced on Italian radio last year. “And we must work in parliament to win rights equivalent to marriage in Italy too”.