Monaco's Three-Day Royal Wedding Kicks Off!

Wedding festivities have begun in Monaco for the lavish three-day, $60 million royal wedding that will see former playboy Prince Albert II marry his commoner bride Charlene Wittstock.

The celebrity-studded event kicked off last night with a concert at the Stade Louis II stadium, featuring Californian rock group The Eagles and watched by 15,000 residents of the tiny Mediterranean state.

The wedding is going ahead amid reports that Wittstock, a South African champion swimmer 20 years his junior, had been getting cold feet — reports which the palace strongly denied.

Prince Albert, 53, will marry Wittstock, 33, in a 40-minute civil ceremony at the Palace on Friday and their union will be solemnized in a public Catholic ceremony in the Palace's main courtyard on Saturday.

The wedding is expected to be the biggest event Monaco has seen wince the 1965 wedding of Albert's mother, Hollywood star Grace Kelly, and father Prince Rainier.

Around 3500 guests have been invited to witness Saturday's religious ceremony, which will also be broadcast live on giant screens in the Palace Square.

Star guests include France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, several European, Middle Eastern and African kings and princes, fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani, supermodel Naomi Campbell, former James Bond actor Roger Moore and Virgin boss Richard Branson.

The ceremony will be followed by a procession, an official dinner catered by renowned chef Alain Ducasse, and a gala ball at the Opera Garnier and the Terraces of the Monte-Carlo Casino.

Friday's festivities will close with a sound and light show over Port Hercules.

The royal couple have survived two scandals arising from the Prince's lifestyle. In 2005 he acknowledged fathering a 22-month old boy with a former flight attendant from Togo and in 2006 DNA tests proved he was also the father of a teenage girl, born to a Californian woman in the early 1990s.

Royal watchers have suggested that Wittstock may have more difficulty fitting in with royal life than Prince William's wife Catherine — now the Duchess of Cambridge — because unlike the former Middleton, Wittstock had a working class upbringing and did not attend posh private schools.

The former Olympic backstroke swimmer is said to have bonded with Prince Albert over their shared love of sport, with Albert having also competed in the Olympics, on a bobsled team.