In Greek - nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.
It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.
this device isn't a space ship - it's a time machine
it goes backwards and forwards.  takes us to a place where we ache to go again. 
it's not called the wheel. it's called the carousel. 
it let's us travel the way a child travels.
round and round and back home again. 
to a place where we know we are loved.

-Matthew Weiner

In the last days of my mother’s life, she no longer wanted or needed food. Desperately, as if  magically through food I might be able to save her life, I prepared the most colorful, elaborate meals and served them to her at her bedside on plates made of fine china.  In those final days, the untouched plates served as markers for my last acts of love, my attempt to nourish her, as she had me, my whole life. As her body shut down, she could only take nourishment from energy and memories.  As she lost a sense of time and place, she allowed us to enter her dreams, traveling through time, speaking of the places and people that mattered in her life.  One moment she was in a fixed moment in time and the next, she described flying through the air with large white birds. One of the last things she asked me was, “Where is my mother?”  Again and again she asked this question.  Finally, although I doubted she could hear me any longer, I gently started to tell her that grandmother was no longer alive. But before I could finish saying it, she cried out, “Oh, there she is!” and then she was no longer with me.

I arrived to Italy one month later, having witnessed within two weeks of each other, the deaths of both my parents.  My internal landscape had been not merely shaken, but decimated. No marker left to tell me which way was home. No sign to say this way or that way. Just silence, a blank canvas, and the sound of the beating of my heart.

 I could not have imagined that one year later, during the very month that marked the anniversary of my parents death, I would find myself embarking on a thesis project, (aptly named – Project: Mothers) that would take me, a translator and a photographer friend from New York around the whole of Lazio, Italy. One by one, mother by mother, I gathered a fortress of women around me. Unexpectedly, but poetically, I realized I was being guided to a new construction of the idea of home. 

My aim was to record from each mother a poignant memory from their lives that was explicitly linked to a recipe.  I sought to document both visually and audibly a tiny morsel of what's being lost – tradition, knowledge and the seasoned philosophies of those who still know the land —  and to write their stories through the lens of my own memories.  I do this in the honor of my mother and all mothers whose magical hands and unstoppable hearts have for centuries been the true architects and steady stewards of the movement I like to call:  The Original Slow Food.