Painted during lockdown, this painting is the artist’s ‘Garden of Eden’ with her father, expressed through a woven narrative of nostalgia and sadness. Ross’s father passed away in 2019 and in this the work the underlying thin washes of Prussian blue paint express a poignant grief. The title refers to Vittorio De Sica’s acclaimed film, a cinematic masterpiece that deals, in a subtle manner, with a tragic chapter of mankind. Ross shared with her father a mutual love of cinema and nature, and the two saw this film together in London in the early 1970s. Ross states "The film creates a feeling of nostalgia for a lost time and place, when people still inhabiting their world could sense it slipping away, and already missed what they had not yet lost. This is a metaphor for the changes I experienced during the pandemic and through lockdowns. As solace I am beckoned into a lush landscape, a place of Zen and hope where there are Japanese pink blossoms, Willow trees and a stream."