In the garden of the historical home at 310 Jefferson Street in Athens, a Louisiana woman and an Italian man display a variety of roses and other plants as diverse as their own roots.

Enrico Poggio and Sally Colocho, married for 16 years, moved to Athens in the 1990s and live on East Washington Street. Poggio’s rose addiction started there.

“We just wanted to add some color to the old house,” he said. “It was something peaceful and it’s a challenge.”

Athens reminded Poggio of the small town of Alessandria, Italy, in the Po Valley where he lived as a child. The couple liked that Athens has a small town feel with a lot of historical homes, he said.

The couple and their daughter Francesca, now 12, moved to the home in 1997.

“We love Athens…. We loved this house. The first thing we did was start on the garden,” Poggio said.

In life

Poggio speaks with an accent that reflects a cultured life with a variety of places and professions intertwined. He began life in Italy and his family moved to Uruguay when he was 10 years old. He headed to Boston for college and has been in the United States since.

Poggio began his career as a physicist after receiving his Ph.D from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent seven years doing quantum field theory research at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis universities before taking a job at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He worked on high-energy elementary particle quantum field theories and co-authored a highly cited paper with Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg.

Then in the late 1980s, Poggio returned to school to obtain a master’s degree from the institute and he began working for Nichols Research Corporation in Massachusetts. He traveled to the Huntsville office of NRC so often that he decided to move to the area.

“I found Sally on the way,” he said.

Poggio and Colocho eventually became part of a group that started a business in Huntsville called deciBel Research. There they work on radar system technology for missile defense contracts. Poggio also is a featured professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Poggio has two older daughters, Alessandra, who is an interior decorator in Maine, and Giuliana, who works in Washington D.C. Colocho has one son, Andres, who is a junior at Milsap College in Mississippi.

The couple’s daughter together, Francesca, attends Country Day School and lives with them in Athens.