Lidia Bastianich’s American Dream
The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates, Interview Series
For cookbook author, television personality, and restaurateur Lidia Bastianich, her story begins with an upbringing in Pula, a formerly Italian city turned Yugoslavian under Tito’s communist regime. She enjoyed a childhood surrounded by love and security — despite the family’s poverty — and learned everything about Italian cooking from her beloved grandmother, Nonna Rosa.
During our interview, Lidia Bastianich discusses, that when the communist regime began investigating the family, they fled to Trieste, Italy, where they spent two years in a refugee camp waiting for visas to enter the United States, an experience that shaped Bastianich for the rest of her life. At 12, she started a new life in New York. She began working in restaurants as a young teenager, the first step in a food career that would make her name.
