By Professor Dorothea Barrett
Fifty years ago today, in the Spring semester of 1973, Angela Demopoulos and Ben Mack met as students at Syracuse in Florence. They remember dancing together at the St Valentine’s Day party in Room 13 of the Villa Rossa: that was the beginning of their romance. After graduating from college in 1974 and getting married three years later, Angela and Ben moved to Washington DC where Angela worked at the National Endowment of Humanities and Ben taught history at high school. Then they moved to New Orleans, while Ben attended law school at Tulane, and finally settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where their three children – Alex, Benjamin, and Anna – were all born and grew up.
Fast forward to forty years after her parents’ met at SUF: in the Fall of 2013, Anna Mack was studying at NYU in Florence when she met Ben Pardee, who was studying at SUF. Anna and Ben were introduced through mutual friends and discovered that they both had classes with Prof. Dorothea Barrett. Anna’s parents came to visit her in Florence for Thanksgiving break, so Prof. Barrett arranged for Anna and her parents to visit Villa Rossa.
Fall 2013
Anna and Ben returned to their respective home universities (Wake Forest and Bates) and graduated in 2015. They then both moved to New York, settled together in Brooklyn, and got married in April 2022.
Anna’s father Ben now has a law practice in Charleston, and her mother Angela works as the Executive Director of the Gibbes Museum.
In August 2022, Anna and Ben returned to Florence for their honeymoon. They visited the Villa Rossa and met up with Prof. Loredana Tarini, who was Ben’s Italian teacher in 2013. Anna now works as a producer on Broadway, and Ben is a product manager for Condé Nast Traveler.
in Florence August 2022 – come back soon!