Isaia Mattia Crosson and Anne Herndon Keffer met in 2018 when they were the first to arrive at their friends’ Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan for Christmas Day brunch.
“I was in charge of cold cuts,” said Mr. Crosson, who is Italian and usually spent the holidays with his maternal family in Lodi, Italy. (His father lives in Carnac, France.) “Anne and her sister brought cheeses,” and added with a laugh, “We brought things that should be paired.”
Mr. Crosson, 32, stayed in town to do research at Columbia on his doctoral dissertation on the aesthetics of incompleteness in Roman epic poems, while Ms. Keffer, 38, said she and her sister Ella planned to stay in New York instead of returning home to Dover, Ohio.
“I was smitten,” Ms. Keffer said. “I thought he was cute. He has the best smile. He’s very warm.”
She noticed him chatting and laughing with her sister, who returned from Naples, Italy, a month earlier, where she had spent a couple of years as a nurse for the United States Navy. Ms. Keffer wondered “Does he like Ella,” but quickly realized: “He’s not her type.”
A few hours later, Ms. Keffer then got a chance to speak to Mr. Crosson, and charmed him with her adventures in Italy while visiting her sister, and hunting for truffles along uncertain, narrow uphill roads in Umbria.
“Her personality was extremely exuberant,” said Mr. Crosson, impressed she was a young associate at the Metropolitan Opera. “She is beautiful with a gorgeous smile.”
Mr. Crosson received a doctorate in classics from Columbia in April, and is an adjunct professor in Latin and Greek there and at Fordham. He graduated with honors from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.
Ms. Keffer works in Manhattan as the senior content producer at Addison Design, a financial branding and design company where she supervises the visual production department. She graduated cum laude from the University of Cincinnati.
After they stepped onto the terrace that evening they had their first kiss, and exchanged numbers before he walked home to Morningside Heights, and the sisters, who lived around the corner from each other, took an Uber to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“My intention was to text her in the morning,” he said. “She preceded me.”
That week they went on several dates, including dinner New Year’s Eve at Misirizzi, an Italian restaurant, followed by a party in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Ten days later when he went to San Diego to deliver a paper on the role of Julius Caesar in the epic poem “Pharsalia” by Lucan, she sent a note and flowers to the hotel.
“I loved the gesture,” he said.
On July 14, before she began a seven-week virtual reality video project in Europe, North America and Asia, he proposed in Central Park’s Hallett Nature Sanctuary.
They planned a wedding, with 85 guests, July 5 at St. George Basilica in Como, Italy. But, because of the coronavirus, their flights to Rome were canceled. They made it to Rome via Amsterdam, and then drove to Milan for a 14-day quarantine with his best man, who lives there.
They were still married on July 5 at the Basilica, with only 22 guests. Bishop Egidio Miragoli officiated in Italian (she memorized her vows in Italian), with about 50 friends and family, including the bride’s parents Patricia and Kevin Keffer, on Zoom during the ceremony.
“It was perfectly imperfect,” said Ms. Keffer, who is taking the groom’s name, but “I got to marry the man of my dreams.”
