When Utah Jazz forward Mike Brown and Alessia Crippa decided to get married, they knew they'd have to do it twice.
Because Brown's intended was from Italy, a ceremony in each country was needed. The couple planned to do a big wedding only once, so they settled on Crippa's hometown of Desio, outside Milan, as the place for it.They had a storybook wedding July 1, then honeymooned for two months. Friday, they wrapped things up with a simple ceremony before a Salt Lake justice of the peace, followed by a casual party at friend Karl Malone's house.
The contrast between the two ceremonies was dramatic. Five thousand people came to the wedding in Italy, Brown said - about 3,000 inside the church and another 2,000 in the square outside.
"We had no idea it was going to be that way," he said, but the event was big news in the small town.
"She was like the princess," dressed in a gown with an 8-foot train, said Brown, smiling down at his bride.
The surprise of Friday's wedding came when the justice of the peace asked if she hadn't met the couple two weeks earlier in Disneyland. As it turned out, they had met her while they were on their honeymoon and she was on vacation but had no idea that she would be the person to marry them.
The two-month honeymoon covered plenty of ground, with stops in Europe, Korea, Hong Kong, New York and Los Angeles. Brown said he and his wife have traveled 31,000 miles this summer.
And travel will continue to be a large part of their life. When he's not crisscrossing the country during the basketball season, they'll spend part of each summer in East Orange, N.J., where his family lives, stop in Chicago to check on the house he bought while playing for the Bulls, and go to Italy for a couple of months. "We have a place over there. I do my basketball camp over there," he said.
The couple met about three years ago when Brown was playing in the Italian basketball league for a team based in Desio. He stayed at a hotel run by her father.
It was the first year the Desio team had had American players. "It was different, because we don't have blacks there," and the cultures were quite different, the new Alessia Brown said of her romance with the basketball player.