If you’ve found yourself invested in Amy and Lino’s relationship, you may want to know: Does Lino die in From Scratch on Netflix and what happens to him after his cancer diagnosis?
From Scratch is based on Tembi Locke’s bestselling memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, which tells the love story between Locke and her husband, Rosario “Saro” Gullo, a Sicilian chef she met on the street in Florence, whom she later marries and creates a life with in Los Angeles, along with their adopted daughter, Zoela. In an interview with TODAY in 2022, Locke, who also executive produced From Scratch, explained what viewers can expect from Netflix’s TV adaptation of her memoir. “They are in for a love story that, like life, is surprising and ever changing. A love story that deepens in ways that perhaps you don’t know could happen. They’re also in for a love story that goes beyond romantic love – bigger and more expansive than just romantic love,” she said.
Though Locke executive produced the series, she told TODAY that she tried not to watch too much of the show to “protect” her own memories of her relationship with Saro. “I didn’t watch the visuals because I want to maintain and protect my own memories. Suddenly you start to remember the thing that was made, and you forget the original images,” she said. In From Scratch, Locke described her relationship with Saro as “two forks eating off one plate.” She wrote, “He soothed the places I hadn’t known needed soothing, seemed perfectly willing to embrace the parts of me that were wanton, unsettled, unfinished, and contradictory. Together we had engaged life as two forks eating off one plate. Ready to listen, to love, to look into the darkness and see a thin filament of the moon.”
So…does Lino die in From Scratch? Read on for what we know about if Lino dies in From Scratch and what happened to Tembi Locke’s real husband, Saro Gullo. Tembi and Saro’s love story is even more heartbreaking than Amy and Lino’s.
Does Lino die in From Scratch?
Image: Courtesy of Netflix.
SPOILER: Does Lino die in From Scratch? The answer is yes. Lino dies in episode seven of From Scratch after his cancer comes back and spreads to his lungs. Lino was first diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a rare soft muscle tissue cancer in his knee, in episode four, after several rounds of chemotherapy, an experimental trial and a surgery to remove the cancer in his knee, Lino seemed to be cancer free. He lived for seven more years, where he and Amy adopted a baby girl named Idalia, before his cancer returned and he died as a result of his complications.
From Scratch is based on Tembi Locke’s bestselling memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, in which she tells the love story between herself and her late husband, Rosario “Saro” Gullo, who inspired Lino. Like Lino, Saro was diagnosed with with leiomyosarcoma in 2002 and remained married to Tembi, who inspired Amy, for 10 years until his death in 2012. Tembi, who co-wrote and executive produced From Scratch with her sister Attica Locke, told TODAY in 2022 about how she could feel Saro’s presence on set. “I can’t imagine having it been done any other way,” she said. “The best thing I could offer was to be the guardian of the essence of the story. I knew we could change things. But if the storyline had to go left, then it still had to follow the emotional heartbeat of reality.”
In the interview, Tembi revealed that, while filming, she learned that cast member Lucia Sardo, who played Lino’s mother Filomena, knew Saro’s childhood friend. Tembi also learned that Marcello Mazzarella, who plays Lino’s doctor in Sicily, had met Saro in 1990. “They had met by chance in Sicily. He was like, ‘Wait a minute. I passed through his town and I met him. He said he had a Black wife from L.A. who was an actress in Hollywood,” Tembi told TODAY. “I was like, ‘What is happening right now?” She continued, “These are the kind of ways that made me think, ‘Saro’s hand is very much at the spiritual level of orchestrating this. I don’t know how any of this is happening.’”
Tembi’s sister, Attica, also recalled an “intensely emotional” and “out of body experience” she had while filming a scene in Sicily, where an actor called her “attachina,” a nickname Saro called her. “That is a nickname Saro called me. I had no heard that in 10 years. I said, ‘Why did you just say that?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. It just came to me,” Attica said. “It felt like he was right here.” Tembi also told Shondaland in 2022 about how writing From Scratch was both a healing and painful process. “Memoir in itself is a labor of love. It asks the writer to revisit the most difficult, challenging times of [their] life. You reimagine it in an artful way, hoping if someone else reads it, they will see themselves and their own experience; it inspires them,” she said. “That’s why I wrote a memoir. I want to know how people get through things. It’s about the human experience. There are moments that are incredibly joyful. Writing the book, I don’t know if I would have otherwise visited my own 20-year-old self if I didn’t have to re-create it on the page. It gave me joy to fall in love with my husband again in the writing of the book. I had the tremendous pain of revisiting his death and his early years of illness. But I had supportive people around me. I had folks I would call after really harrowing writing days.”
She also told Shondaland about what she learned from Saro. “He showed me the poetry of life. As the son of a farmer, he taught me to slow down and see the beauty of an artichoke’s gradation of color, for example. He had a poeticism about him. To live with him for 20 years, it stayed with me,” she said. “He taught me to love fully and deeply. My heart is bigger because of him. He would always say, ‘Everything makes the soup,’ an Italian saying that means basically that everything makes life. We just have to go with it. Another one was: ‘You wanted the bicycle; now pedal.’ It’s about wanting things in life, and you get what you ask for. Now ride.”
Image: Simon & Schuster.
For the real story that inspired Netflix’s From Scratch, read Tembi Locke’s memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home. In the New York Times bestseller, Tembi—who inspired the character Amy in the 2022 miniseries From Scratch—writes about her “love at first sight” romance with Rosario “Saro” Gullo, a Sicilian chef she met on a street in Florence, Italy. The memoir takes readers through Tembi and Saro’s romance, from their struggles with Saro’s traditional Sicilian family who disapproved of him marrying a Black American woman to their move to Los Angeles, where they adopted their daughter, Zoela. The book also tells the heartbreaking story of his battle with Cancer and how Tembi and Zoela rebuilt their life after his death. From Scratch also follows Tembi and Zoela on three summers in Italy, where she reunites with Saro’s once estranged family and tries to find herself again without her husband. “Locke’s raw and heartfelt memoir will uplift readers suffering from the loss of their own loved ones,” reads a review by Publisher’s Weekly.
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