Roots & Routes is a project in which food becomes a lens for understanding how memory, movement and relationship intersect. Through the gestures of cooking, sharing and tasting, memory is carried in both body and imagination, tracing histories while opening new possibilities for connection and community. Rome, a city shaped by centuries of arrivals, departures and resettlements, becomes the living backdrop for the project. Beyond its monuments, the city reveals itself in kneading hands, exchanged stories and shared meals. Here, food becomes a meeting point: a way of exploring identity and belonging through everyday practices.
The residency developed with the support and participation of two local communities on the outskirts of the city, with whom Latitudo has maintained a long-standing relationship: L’Approdo, a family home for migrant adolescents located in Vigne Nuove (Rome’s 3rd Municipality), and the Galline Bianche Library in Labaro (15th Municipality), a hub closely connected to the children and families of the neighbourhood. Three artists – Camille Orlandini, Ombretta Gamberale and Gaia Scaramella – developed parallel processes that intertwined across the two spaces, each bringing a distinct approach.
French artist Camille Orlandini balances visual art and culinary design, working in intimate contexts where gesture becomes a form of storytelling. Her project Faire Pain Commun (Making Bread Together) began along the Tiber River, linking two communities at opposite ends of the city while exploring how different landscapes, atmospheres and cultural traditions influence the fermentation of bread. At L’Approdo, adolescents began with impastare – the tactile ritual of kneading dough, pressing and folding flour and water into forms familiar to them. Together, participants walked along the river, recording the murmur of water and the textures of trees and bridges, discovering how its flow connects Rome with the distant territories that have shaped their identities. At the Galline Bianche Library, children created small pamphlets inspired by images of bread-making found on the shelves. They traced the river in blue lines, allowing it to meander across pages and imaginations. Under Camille’s guidance, they nurtured sourdough starters, naming each one before taking them home and learning patience and care. When they returned, the fermented cultures had grown and were ready to be kneaded and transformed. Different breads were tasted and compared, revealing how the same dough can take on unexpected forms and stories depending on context. Through these workshops, impastare – a word that was initially lost in translation during the first meeting with Camille – became both the thread and the title of her work, Impastare, da una sponda all’altra del Tevere (Kneading, from one bank of the Tiber to the other), a shared practice of care and attention linking generations, cultures and place.
“Per stampare bisogna imparare a scrivere al contrario” (To print, one must first learn to write backwards), reads a playful instruction from the recipe book created during Ombretta Gamberale’s workshop, Ricette Memorabili (Memorable Recipes). An artist whose practice revolves around printmaking and the materiality of line, Ombretta uses this phrase as both a literal and metaphorical guide, inviting participants to rethink how memory is formed and transformed. At L’Approdo, adolescents explored printing techniques using Tetra Pak packaging as etching plates, sketching their favourite recipes before pressing them by turning an old pasta machine – the kind used by Italian grandmothers – into a homemade mini printing press, bringing their recipes to life as illustrations. A later visit to Ombretta’s studio allowed them to encounter a full-size printing press and gain insight into her practice. At the Galline Bianche Library, children brought family recipes and shared them through storytelling. Guided by a red thread, they connected narratives through tactile gestures, mixing, drawing and inventing new dishes, while “observing” herbs through smell before printing them. The recipe book took its title from one of the invented dishes, Mistatutto! (Mix Everything!), marking a shift from memorabili as a nostalgic or protective idea of memory towards the experience of a truly memorable event – one in which cultures, generations and ingredients mix freely, where anything can happen, and where food becomes a medium that carries private recollections into a collective narrative, an archive that grows through encounter.
For Roman artist Gaia Scaramella, ordinary objects and everyday actions can be deconstructed and reimagined to reveal new ways of seeing and understanding. In her residency project Milky Way, she approached this exploration through play and imagination. Beginning with the simple, universal ingredient of milk, Scaramella and the children of the Galline Bianche Library explored culinary traditions from Sicily and Puglia, tasting iconic pastries such as Minne di Sant’Agata and Tette delle Monache. Through these experiences, they reflected on nourishment, maternal care and folklore, while using salt dough to recreate the desserts and playfully step into the role of pastry chefs. The children then followed the journey of a single droplet of milk through storytelling, imagining it travelling from the kitchen to join others in the Milky Way, spinning from rooted customs into imaginative chaos. They built rocket ships from recycled cardboard and created their own miniature cosmos, linking a daily material to vast and infinite ideas. Through these activities, the project connected the personal and the universal, showing how acts of individual care can resonate within broader life cycles and shared experiences.
The residency culminated in a collective meal at the Saxa Rubra Preschool, located in Rome’s 15th Municipality, presented in collaboration with the parallel project Anatomie del Nutrimento (winner of Avviso Pubblico Artes et Iubilaeum 2025, funded by the European Union’s Next Generation EU), which also centred on food as a key element. Rome-based chef Aurelio Carraffa joined the artists to create dishes inspired by the workshops, bringing together bread, milk, herbs and stories in a menu that reflected the journeys of all the projects.
Everything begins somewhere – a thought, a question, a seed – and then it moves. It twists, grows and finds new forms. Throughout the residency, everyone involved changed and adapted. Children, adolescents, neighbours and artists each contributed something unique. Roots & Routes frames belonging as an ongoing practice rather than a fixed state. The residency attends to the invisible: aromas that recall distant places, gestures passed down unconsciously, and the paths carried by those newly arrived and those long rooted in the city. Identity, like food, is something made together – shaped by movement, softened through encounter and carried along routes both seen and unseen.
Curatorial text by Beatrice Morino