From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

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I imagined Sloane had tried everything, which was exactly what I was thinking about when we rounded the corner of Via dell’Acqua and I collided with a man.

By the time I was old enough to understand who she was, I began to spend hours wondering about this woman, this hero, this person who had chosen a name for me before I had even taken my first breath.We were standing in front of Vivoli, which, I had been told, made the best gelato in all of Tuscany.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. By morning I was back in my three-person room at the pensione , staring at the ceiling and seriously considering pinching myself. They build a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopt at birth.All along the way she reflects on her and Saro’s romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages. On the steps of the duomo, I positioned myself in front of Ghiberti’s voluminous bronze cathedral doors and waited for Saro.

Lovely writing – about her travels, family dynamics and how wacky those can be, the many forgivenesses time helps with in that area, and lots and lots of Sicilian cooking, tastes and pleasures. Mom’s second house, Dad’s place as a new divorcé or the one he had as a newly remarried man with a child on the way. After one late-night romp in his bedroom on the top floor of his frat house, I helped him clean up beer cups while he helped me decide to take a semester abroad in Italy. Safe enough to take a risk on something no one in my family had seen coming—a potential long-distance relationship with an Italian man twelve years older, without a college degree, who was banking on “cooking” as the means of supporting our future together. It is a little heavy since it’s about grief, but it’s also so full of love and maintains a really uplifting and hopeful tone.

Italy is one of my favorite places in the world (and I can’t wait to visit once travel is safe and we are allowed back into the EU…), and this memoir was part love letter to Tembi’s late husband, part love letter to Italy.

Publisher Synopsis: It was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. I have unintentionallly put myself through the emotional ringer this month reading so many back to back books regarding death and grief, but it has turned out to be an incredibly cathartic experience for me.

By now Sherra and Gene had two children—my sister Attica was born three years after me—whom they took along with them as they each, in their own way, began to reconfigure their own idea of family. After Saro’s passing, Tembi visits her in-laws in Sicily, and continues to do so each subsequent summer. She had nearly been speaking in tongues on the three-hour speed boat ride we had had to take to get from the mainland to Stromboli.