Sloane squeezed my hand and leaned in for a whisper. “I’ll make Massimo show you his art collection before we leave.”

This book is about Tembi and Saro’s love and their struggles once he was diagnosed with cancer. His death was heartbreaking to Tembi and their daughter, Zoela. How does one cope with the loss of the love of your life? How were Tembi and her daughter able to move forward? This is what this memoir explores. Later then, there’s time.” She turned the motor. “We’re going to meet my friends near San Casciano first. Dinner at their house. He’s a painter, she does the window dressings for Luisa. Then we’ll all head to the bar.” She took a long drag, then extinguished the joint on the floorboard of the car. Lucia returned again and again, with heaping plates of strozzapreti with braised red radicchio in a mascarpone sauce; fusilli in a fire-roasted bell pepper sauce; gnocchi with gorgonzola in a white martini reduction with shaved aged parmigiano. I began to see that Saro was speaking directly to me, each dish an edible love letter: succulent, bold. By the third and fourth courses, I accepted that this chef who wore elf boots was making love to me, and we hadn’t even so much as kissed.

Another large chunk of the series is true to the spirit of the book, if not the letter. Sometimes narrative necessity and strict memories didn’t coincide precisely. “So maybe that moment would happen a little bit later in the episode, or maybe it would come in the next episode,” Tembi says. “But we know that the characters need to have traversed this moment somehow.”

Just come outside, one moment. I want to make you a surprise.” English should always sound like this. I let him take my hand. After high school, Tembi lived in Italy for a period of time and this is where she met her first husband, Soro Gullo, a Sicilian chef. The couple eventually lived and worked inLos Angeles,California. How does Zoela both comfort and challenge Tembi after Saro’s death? Did Tembi’s description of parenting through grief surprise you in any way? I felt gushy inside, flush with liquor and excitement. My pant leg caught the pedal as I tried to mount the bike. I was in no position to refuse. The rush of adrenaline and liquor in equal measure told me so. An hour later, I looked out the window of the penthouse apartment in Piazza del Carmine. It was too late for breakfast, the only type of food we kept in the house, and I was too worried to go out for lunch. I wanted to wait for Saro’s call. I knew it would come. I would have bet my life on it. I felt as though I knew him. Well, I didn’t really know him, but I knew his heart. Surely something serious must have happened for him to have stood me up.

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We rode through the streets of Florence that night in silent unison. We passed Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, and the play of shadows danced across his face. A nocturnal bike ride through the center of Florence on a foggy morning with an Italian chef at my side. I had not expected as much as this from my semester abroad. But maybe somewhere deep down inside I had hoped for it. I wanted to pinch myself. But I didn’t need to. This was too good to be real. Saro was too good to be true. This puff of Italian romance would implode in a moment. I knew it would. I didn’t trust what came easy. I certainly didn’t trust love or me at love. Connor was a senior and New England blueblood who had family in Italy. 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.

Va bene,” I said, quietly exhilarated that my destiny with greatness might just begin with a good meal. Then come to the restaurant tonight. I will make you dinner.” Before I could respond, his voice broke with sincerity. “Please, come. Invite a friend, if you please. It would be my pleasure.” Then he paused. “I think we could be something great.”Lino declares his love for Amy just before she leaves Italy for LA, and the couple become inseparable. Love, as a lasting thing, was a concept that was elusive to me. My parents separated when I was seven, divorced by the time I was eight. My mother remarried when I was nine, my father when I was twelve. While I was in Florence, my mother was divorcing again after nearly twelve years with my stepfather. Throughout my childhood, I had lived in five different houses over the course of ten years. This parent’s house versus that parent’s house. 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. When my college friends talked about “going home,” they often referred to a specific place with a bedroom in which they had lost their first tooth or first sneaked a boy inside. That version of home was foreign to me. I didn’t have a fixed place to which I could attach memories. Sure, there had been houses, homes even, but they came with emotional caveats. I had had a kind of bifurcated childhood, trying to fit into whatever configuration of my parents’ life was presently in formation. It was common to my generation of baby boomers’ children. My parents, Sherra and Gene, were no different. By the end of the dinner, I was in rapture, satiated, giddy, light-headed with the possibility that Saro was boyfriend material. I briefly considered a cigarette, though I had never smoked in my life.