Family & Community Archives

“Homemade Pasta and the Taste of Home” is an illustrated recipe for homemade pasta by Lara Tarantini, which includes the creator's personal journey from feeling lost and isolated towards self-discovery and self-reliance. It consists of an illustrated recipe to make tagliatelle, a kind of egg noodles typical of the Northern Italian region where the creator is from, Emilia-Romagna. It is illustrated with pencils and colored with watercolors. The recipe is handwritten, both in English and Italian.

About the Artist

Lara Tarantini is an international graduate student at the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona. Tarantini holds Master’s degree in Asian and African Languages and Cultures from the University of Bologna, Italy and a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Arizona. Lara currently works on food and the spatiality of food discourses.

 Tarantini is one of the many international students that are stuck in the United States as the flights to go home have been canceled. During the Spring Break, Lara was supposed to visit her family as her father had a stroke right before she had to come back in January for the beginning of the Spring semester. Lara decided to cancel her trip as she expected the transcontinental flights to be cancelled (which is exactly what happened) for fear that she would have not been able to return to the States. Lara thinks about that decision every single day, how things would have been different had she caught that last opportunity to go home. Lara  knows she will not have to stay in the States forever, but thinking that her mother is dealing with her father’s condition alone has been troubling her.

Besides being a graduate student, Taratini is a watercolor amateur. She took classes in the past on watercolors and during the transition to online classes, she admits she spent more time taking online watercolor classes than doing her required readings for her coursework.