“There’s a lot that I have to be really proud of in my life, but there’s nothing I’m more proud of than my relationship,” Athena Calderone says of her 25-year marriage to her husband Victor. The interior designer and founder of EyeSwoon admits it wasn’t always easy. “We put work into it every single day,” she adds. But over 9,000 of those days, and what Calderone describes as “a beautiful friendship” later, it was all worth the effort.
So, to mark their milestone silver anniversary—which also coincided with Calderone’s 50th birthday—they decided to recommit to the vows they promised each other long ago. The first time, it was in Southampton, where Calderone wore a custom dress by Dolce & Gabbana as they wed in front over two hundred people. This time, however, it was in an 11th-century Umbrian church on the Tenuta di Murlo estate in front of just eight. “There was nothing formal about this,” she says of her vow renewal.
Okay, maybe there was something a little formal. Mainly, Calderone’s look: she wore a Christian Dior dress from the fall 2022 collection, paired with a John Hardy bracelet and antique diamond earrings from the 1920s. (They were a gift from Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent.) But there were no flowers, no live music, no priest or ordained minister. Instead, the two recited their vows amid candlelit in a ceremony officiated by the couple’s son, Jivan. “It was literally just me and my family—saying okay, the lighting’s really pretty right now, let’s go into the church.”
Calderone laughs recalling how Jivan didn’t write his script until 10 minutes before the ceremony. Months before, she had given him examples of non-denomination vow renewal scripts she found on the internet. “We were literally having lunch on the day of the vow renewal, and he still hadn’t written it,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m not going to write this for him. I’m not going to be that mom.’”
Yet what he wrote exceeded Calderone’s wildest expectations. “Watching the two of you over the years has taught me the beauty of loving someone with patience, compassion, and unwavering devotion,” he told their family and friends in the church. “It’s a gift I hold close to my heart, and one day, I hope to find a love as strong and selfless as yours.” Unsurprisingly, Calderone was quickly in tears.
Afterwards, they held a rustic Italian dinner right in the aisle, with a chef preparing dishes of portino mushrooms and truffles, tagliolini with burrata and tomato sauce, and roasted pork. “It was the perfect meal,” Calderone says.
Now that she’s entering her 26th year of a happy marriage, does Calderone have any advice for the rest of us? “Your marriage needs joy and it needs intimacy,” she says. “We talk about praising our friends, praising our children—I think oftentimes you forget to praise your mate. It’s really important for your husband or your partner to know how much you love them.”