VOWS: ELAINE SCALLAN AND Nicholas Walter were married at the end of June in an olive orchard on the groom's parents' farm in Civitella in Val Di Chiana, Tuscany, Italy.
Elaine Scallan, the daughter of Matt and Ethel Scallan, from Blanchardstown, Dublin, was educated at St Francis Xavier National School and Coolmine Community School. She studied economics and sociology at NUI Maynooth, later graduating from University College Dublin with a PhD in epidemiology, having specialised in food-borne diseases. She was invited to continue this work at the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia and moved to the US in 2003.
Nicholas Walter, the son of Doug and Pam Walter, is originally from Chicago. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont followed by the University of California, San Francisco, where he took degrees in medicine and medical anthropology, completing a residency in internal medicine. They met in 2006 while Elaine was in charge of a CDC food-borne disease surveillance program and Nicholas was interviewing for a job with the group. “She took my breath away. I think I flubbed the interview because I was so distracted,” Nicholas recalls.
Nicholas found work as a public health service officer with a different group at CDC, and engineered another meeting with Elaine through mutual friends some months later. A shared passion for great food led to a date, and Nicholas proposed during a weekend biking trip in the northern Georgia mountains a year later.
“We decided that getting married in a place where everyone would be outside their routine would give us the chance to bring family and friends from different stages of our lives together for a few days,” says Nicholas. Because of the distance, most guests decided to spend the week in Tuscany, so the ceremony took place after four days of exploring the countryside, enjoying long meals and plenty of wine. “We wanted a wedding that was low-key, relaxed and fun,” says Elaine.
They relied on family and friends to decorate the ceremony site. “We didn’t get married until the evening, so on the morning of the wedding it was all hands on deck,” says Elaine. “Our friends helped us string up lights, pick wild flowers for the tables and decorate the ceremony area. This was one of the highlights of the week for me.”
The wedding took place on a hillside overlooking the olive groves and the meal for 200 guests was a traditional Tuscan feast. The couple danced a well-rehearsed salsa and were joined by friends and family from Atlanta, San Francisco, Canada, Australia, Dublin and Scotland. Nicholas’s sister Kristen acted as bridesmaid and the best man was Elaine’s brother Mathew. Elaine’s friend from Dublin, Nikki Kavanagh, sang in Italian and English with her partner Ed O’Leary, Elaine’s cousins from New York played the Irish harp and tin whistle, and friends recited poems in Irish and English.
Elaine and Nicholas now live in Denver, Colorado where Elaine is an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Public Health. Nicholas is a research fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Colorado, where he studies tuberculosis.
Photograph: EUGENIA VUJACIC ImmaginePhotography.com