LOREDANA DISTEFANO and Garrett Higgins were married in the Church of San Nicola, a medieval church set among the Greek Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, Sicily, on June 1st. The celebrant was Fr Don Angelo Brancato.
Lori, who works for Xerox Ireland, is the daughter of Giuseppe and Francesca Distefano, from Porto Empedocle, a small seaside town near Agrigento. She has three older siblings, Mariella, Cinzia and Giovanni, and attended a school named after the famous Sicilian writer, Leonardo Sciascia. Garrett is the son of Tom and Mary Higgins from Loughlinstown and has one sister, Elaine and one brother, Conor. He was educated at Gonzaga College in Ranelagh, Dublin, and has a BA in Italian and English and an MA in Italian from University College, Dublin. He moved to Bologna in 1994, where he worked as a translator, and moved back to Ireland in 2005. The couple met in Bologna in December 2002 – “love at first sight” – and became engaged on June 1st, 2008, exactly one year before the wedding.
Guests from Bologna, Athens, London, New York and Dublin delighted in Sicilian cuisine and local traditional dancers. According to Sicilian tradition, the rings are carried into the church by a child; in this case, the groom’s nephew Freddie, his sister’s son, obliged.
The couple had planned to spend their honeymoon in Mexico, but went to Isola Margherita and other islands off the coast of Venezuela instead. They are living in Swords “for the time being, anyway”.