Growing up with rabbits, ducks and goats.

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich.

Question: Where are you from and how has that shaped you?

Lidia Bastianich: I was born in ________, which is now Croatia. It was Italy.

I think that my origins had a tremendous shaping of my . . . who I am, my personality, my career and so on. ___________ is a city in Istria. Istria is a little Peninsula that ________ Adriatic which is part of Croatia now. But World War II kind of changed the whole demographics there, or the whole __________ and Istria, being Italian, were given to Yugoslavia as the spoils of World War II.

And therefore being ethnic Italian, where the government that came in was Communist, was a tremendous change. And those were my formative years really. My parents ultimately decided to escape. Because once it was a Communist state, we literally had to escape back to Italy. Those years really did shape me and sort of created my philosophy of life.

Recorded on: October 4, 2007