Lidia Bastianich - Early Life

Early Life

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich was born on February 21, 1947, in Pula, now a city in Croatia, then part of Italy, but made a part of Yugoslavia after September 15, 1947 according to Paris Peace Treaties. Living nine years under Marshal Tito's Communist regime in Yugoslavia, her father, Vittorio, in 1956 sent his wife and their two children to visit relatives in Trieste, Italy, while he remained in Istria to comply with the government's mandate that one member of a family remain in Yugoslavia to ensure that the rest would return. Hours later, Vittorio himself left Yugoslavia under cover of darkness and crossed the border into Italy. Their departure was part of the larger Istrian exodus.

The Matticchio family reunited in Trieste, Italy, joining other families who had claimed political asylum from Communist Yugoslavia starting in 1947, many of whom remained in refugee camps throughout Italy for years. For the Bastianich family, the camp was one that had been an abandoned rice factory in Trieste that had been converted to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and partially destroyed towards the end of the war, the Risiera di San Sabba. According to Lidia in a PBS documentary, although a wealthy Triestian family hired Lidia's mother as a cook–housekeeper and her father as a limousine driver, they remained residents of the refugee camp. Two years later, their displaced persons application was granted to emigrate to the U.S. In 1958, unlike the earlier groups of World War II refugees whose journeyed to their adoptive homelands by "liberty ships" that took at least seven days to arrive at their destinations in North and South America, the Bastianich family had the good fortune to reach New York City by airplane.

Bastianich gives credit to the family's new roots in America to their sponsor, Catholic Charities:

After a few weeks, the family moved to North Bergen, New Jersey, near the Chevrolet factory where Lidia's father began working as a mechanic. Later, they moved to Astoria, Queens, where they had family, friends, and relatives living in a large enclave of fellow Istrian immigrants. Lidia started working part-time when she was 14 (the legal age for a work permit), during which time she briefly worked at the Astoria bakery owned by Christopher Walken's father. After graduating from high school, she began to work full-time in local Italian restaurants.

At her sweet sixteen birthday party, she was introduced to her future husband, Felice "Felix" Bastianich, a fellow Istrian Italian immigrant and restaurant worker from Labin (Albona), Istria. The couple married in 1966 and gave birth to their son, Joseph, in 1968. Their second child, Tanya, was born in 1971.