Some students study abroad for a semester and go home with good memories. Alessandro Pugliese studied abroad for a semester — then came back twice more, landed an internship with ACF Fiorentina, and eventually went to work for the club’s owner, Rocco Commisso, back in the United States. Today he’s Manager of Public Relations for Mediacom Communications, the Commisso family business, and he still returns to Florence often enough that it’s less “visiting” and more “coming home.”
Alessandro first arrived at Syracuse Florence as a Discovery student in Fall 2015. As Director Sasha Perugini remembers it, it didn’t take long for him to announce exactly what he wanted: “A first-year student told his marketing professor, Simone Anselmi, MBA, that his dream was to work for Fiorentina, and at the time they weren’t even accepting interns.” Anselmi brought the idea to Perugini, and, as she puts it, “together we figured out how to build a strong Capstone project custom made for this opportunity” — the project that would eventually open Fiorentina’s door to him.
One semester wasn’t enough. Alessandro returned in Fall 2017 as a Discovery Program mentor and again in Spring 2019 for his final undergraduate semester, when he received a certificate of merit from Perugini. He’s since become a fixture around the program: he was recently back in Florence for Fiorentina’s 100th anniversary and, while in town, addressed incoming students during Orientation — in many ways, the ultimate Syracuse Florence success story.
Two Internships, One Owner
“The internship with Fiorentina was in Fall 2017, and funny enough, in 2016 I had done an internship with the New York Cosmos, who were playing Hofstra, where my dad teaches,” Alessandro recalled during his recent visit to campus.
After finishing his final semester in Florence, he was reluctant to leave. “I actually had a job offer at another American school. I was close to taking it because I wanted to stay.” He went home for graduation instead — and weeks later, everything changed. “Rocco Commisso bought Fiorentina. He was an Italian American businessman from Calabria, like my family. I had a connection and got my resume to his American company.” The timing lined up almost too well: two years after his Cosmos internship, Commisso had bought that club; two years after his Fiorentina internship, Commisso bought Fiorentina too. “They saw I had worked for both teams he owned. I had studied in Florence, I knew Italian, and I’d been writing about soccer for five or six years already. The stars really aligned.”
Around the same time, Alessandro obtained Italian citizenship through his mother, who was born in Calabria. He started at Mediacom in August 2019, splitting his time between the company’s corporate side and ongoing work for Fiorentina — pulling stats and analysis for Commisso, and eventually helping with the club’s financial side, from player contracts to sponsorships.
When the pandemic slowed things down, he used the pause to start a master’s in Sports Management at Columbia — the same program Commisso had attended, and for which Commisso wrote his recommendation letter. He finished in May 2023 while working at the same time.
One of the hardest chapters came in March 2024, when Fiorentina’s general manager, Joe Barone, passed away. “I came here with Rocco directly on a private jet. We did the camera ardente at Viola Park, where 20,000 fans came to pay their respects.” Afterward, Commisso asked him to stay in Florence through the end of the season. Looking back on it all, Alessandro said simply: “It feels like it’s gone by in the blink of an eye. Time flies.”
It All Started With a Press Credential
Alessandro says none of it would have happened without his time at Syracuse Florence. “My freshman year, I’d go to games sitting in the Curva Fiesole with the Ultras, or sometimes I’d get a press credential because I was writing for different outlets.” He built his school breaks around matches across Europe — Lisbon, Naples, Paris, Germany.
The turning point came when Fiorentina’s press office gave him that credential as a freshman. “I went there, wrote up a story, and got to interview the players. That was when I first realized maybe this could be a career. If I didn’t come here as a freshman, who knows what would have happened.”
A Second Family in Florence
Alessandro lived with the same host family, the Andorlini’s on Via Masaccio, for all three of his semesters — a rarity he credits with changing his life. He still remembers meeting his host parents in Room 13 of the Villa Rossa, and both of his host brothers have since visited him in New York; he attended one brother’s wedding a year and a half ago. He was staying with the family again during this visit.
His connection to Florence runs deeper still. Two years ago, his parents had coffee here with Professor Debora Spini, whose family his father, historian Stanislao Pugliese, has known for years — Stanislao once interviewed Debora’s brother for one of his books, and gave a lecture at Syracuse Florence during Alessandro’s final semester.
Piazza Savonarola remains his favorite area of the city. “After class, I loved going into the square and seeing all the families with the kids hanging out. My host brothers grew up coming here, we’re just two steps away.” He also spent plenty of time in the Syracuse Florence library — “maybe not so much the first semester, but definitely after.”
Learning Italian — and Falling for Italy All Over Again
Despite his Calabrian roots, Alessandro didn’t grow up speaking Italian. His high school didn’t offer the language, and when his grandparents spoke to his parents in dialect, they responded in English. Then he started Italian 101 as a freshman, with some help from his host family: “They’d say, if you don’t try to speak Italian, we’re not going to feed you. That was good motivation.” He went on to complete a dual major in international relations and Italian studies back at the Syracuse home campus.
His family’s ties to Italy run well beyond Calabria, from cousins who’ve settled near Pesaro to a host brother now working as a judge in Sardinia. “It gives us excuses to go to all the different places to see family,” he said.
As for what’s next: Alessandro’s fiancée, whom he’s been with since high school, studied in Milan the same fall he was back in 2017. The two are now planning to marry in Tuscany. It seems fitting that the place that launched his career will also be where he starts the next chapter of his life.
The Whole Argument for Study Abroad
For Director Sasha Perugini, with whom Alessandro has stayed in touch over the years — “not just with me but with the whole program and especially with his homestay family” — his story is more than a memorable one-off.
“I share his story not because it’s unusual, but because it’s the whole argument for study abroad in one case,” she said. “We talk a great deal about global competencies and cross-cultural fluency, buzz words that flatten what actually happens to people when they leave home for a while and dare to confront uncomfortable scenarios. In the end one learns more about themselves.”
Eleven years after a first-year student told his professor he dreamed of working for Fiorentina, that dream — built, in Perugini’s words, “with more conviction than credentials” — has manifested many times over.