‘From Scratch’: Here’s What Happened to the Real-Life Lino
A true tear-jerker, Netflix’s latest limited series, From Scratch, is capturing fans’ hearts. The show, which is based on a true story, follows Amahle “Amy” Wheeler (Zoe Saldaña), a young Black woman who puts the pursuit of her law degree on pause to move to Italy and study art. Though she’s there to focus on her studies, Amy finds herself enraptured with a Sicilian chef named Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea).
The pair embark on a whirlwind romance, with Lino leaving his life in Italy behind to move to Los Angeles. From Scratch viewers know how Lino’s story ends, but what happened to the real-life Lino?
‘From Scratch’ is based on a true story
While many fans turned on From Scratch to settle in to watch Saldaña cook and eat, they would soon realize that the series was about much more than that. The series is based on author Tembi Locke’s real life and marriage which she chronicled in her best-selling memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home.
In the book, Locke talks about moving to Italy in the 1990s to study art and her whirlwind romance with her husband, a Sicilian chef, Rosario “Saro” Gullo.
Fans know what happened to Lino in the series, but here’s what happened to Locke’s husband, Saro.
Here’s what happened to the real-life Lino
In episode four of From Scratch, Lino is diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a rare soft muscle tissue cancer. After surgery and chemotherapy, he appears to be cancer free and lives for seven more years before his cancer returns and spreads to his lungs.
In episode seven of the series, Lino dies from complications from the disease, leaving Amy and their daughter, Idalia to pick up the pieces. In real life, Tembi Locke’s husband Saro was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma in 2002. He eventually died from the illness in 2012.
“The best thing I could offer was to be the guardian of the essence of the story,” Tembi told TODAY. “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.”
The ‘From Scratch’ timeline was very important to the story
Tembi Locke executive produced the series along with her sister, Attica Locke, who also served as the limited series’s showrunner. Since this story was told over the course of 20 years, the Lockes knew it was important to mirror the timeline as they experienced it.
“We knew we needed to tell it in a linear fashion, not mosaic,” Tembi told Shadow and Act. “That was one of the first decisions we made because we felt that if we were going to ask the audience to go into deep grief, to go into hard places, we didn’t want them to get lost in time and space by switching up.”
Their strategy worked well because the series is currently number one on the streaming service, and people across the globe are discussing how emotional it has been.
