I was born in Milan and grew up between two worlds — Italy and America — never quite belonging fully to either. But in the kitchen, that disappeared. I planned my mother's baby shower at twelve. I cooked elaborate weekend meals as a teenager. Food was never just food for me. It was identity. It was joy. It was the one place the noise went quiet.
My parents wanted a doctor or a lawyer. I started college pre-med, changed to psychology the moment I walked into my first class, and spent years secretly browsing culinary schools at night like I was doing something shameful. Deferring the dream. Telling myself: after. Once I've made them proud. Once I've earned it.
On the first day of my social work master's program, we were handed an article about wounded healers — people drawn to helping professions because of their own unresolved wounds. I read it and felt simultaneously seen and terrified. My first thought wasn't to take care of myself. It was: I better fix this before it interferes with my work.
I was extraordinarily good at compartmentalizing. My schooling gave a clinical name to something I'd been doing since childhood — keeping things in, not taking up too much space — and called it a skill. Meanwhile, I was a therapist by day, closing culinary school browsers by night.
He picked up a brush in retirement and just started creating. We'd paint together in the summers — landscapes, still lifes, no rigid lessons, no fixed outcomes. Just doing. He was also a complete goofball who never stopped being himself no matter how many times my grandmother said "Basta, Cesare." At his funeral, something in me came undone.
Images started flashing — every time I'd clicked the browser shut, every time I'd said "no big deal" when my whole body was screaming otherwise. I looked at him and thought: I am not waiting. I was done waiting.
The name came to me in the shower, with Alicia Keys blasting, when I finally stopped trying so hard. It started as personal chef work, then cooking classes, then adaptive cooking for neurodiverse learners, then the mental health and wellness work I had been missing since I walked away from my master's. Until finally the two worlds I had spent years being told to choose between completely merged.
A student named Tom entered a kitchen for the first time at fifty years old. Within weeks, his father was watching videos of him flipping chicken breasts and cracking eggs. "How did you get him to do that?" he asked. I told him: I didn't get Tom to do anything. I just cleared some space and stepped back. What he did in that space was entirely his own.
My first birth was 63 hours and left me with a wound that quietly infected everything that followed. I went back to work weeks later, riding the subway every morning fighting tears, fantasizing about getting off at Central Park and just sitting in the sun. I never got off the train. I had spent years telling clients they couldn't pour from an empty cup. It was time to do that for myself.
I found a therapist who specialized in birth trauma. I started somatic work. I built a team. I worked with a business coach. And slowly, the thing I had been telling everyone else became something I actually lived. I started choosing myself first.
I had run Well Rooted Kitchen through chaos — building systems only after I'd burned through not having them. I knew what that cost. The second time, I wanted to build differently. Life first. Business second. Not because the business mattered less, but because a business built on top of a depleted person will eventually take the person down with it.
Last summer I took my kids to Italy for a month. Well Rooted Kitchen kept running without me. I was cooking barefoot on 500-year-old terracotta floors, wine in one hand, spatula in the other. That is the proof of concept. I am the proof of concept. And I built Well Rooted You for the woman I was before I became it.