After the death of her husband from cancer, actress Tembi Locke wrote a 2019 memoir about the experience called “From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home.” In her first few years as a widow, she and her young daughter spent their summers in the small town of her husband’s native Sicily, forging an unexpected bond with her mother-in-law and the place itself.
The eight-part Netflix drama “From Scratch,” starring Zoe Saldaña, is a lightly fictionalized adaptation of that story, beginning when Amy (Saldaña in the role based on Locke) enrolls in an art program in Florence, Italy, where she meets and falls in love with a chef named Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea).
Two years later, they’re living together and making a go of it in Los Angeles — she’s working at an art gallery, he’s waiting tables and dreaming of opening his own restaurant. Slowly, things finally look to be coming together for Lino professionally. And then he’s diagnosed with a rare cancer that throws all their plans and shared dreams into disarray.
