Last night, Gracie Mansion hosted a long-running annual reception celebrating Italian heritage, attended by various elected officials, including mayor Eric Adams, and representatives from local Italian cultural societies. Also in attendance was the Consul General of Italy in New York, Fabrizio Di Michele, who delivered a speech centered on Columbus Day, taking a defensive stance against critics of the holiday.
Columbus Day commemorates the Genoese sailor’s landing on the American continent on October 12th 1492, and is celebrated across many countries in the Western hemisphere and Europe. In the U.S. it is mostly treated as a celebration of Italian immigrant culture. In 2021, Joe Biden became the first President to acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a counter-celebration that is gaining traction in tandem with growing awareness of the facts regarding Columbus’ expeditions. According to RenameColumbusDay.org, roughly 216 cities across the country now recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Di Michele framed the growing sentiment against Columbus Day as an attack against the Italian-American community writ large, stating that “there’s something wrong here if the Italian Americans are the only community who cannot have their own symbol, their own narrative, their own epic in this country.” He offered an acknowledgement of concerns surrounding the holiday, but ultimately viewed them as competing with Italian-American culture in a zero-sum game: “we all respect everybody’s sensitivities, everybody’s interpretation of history and different narratives. But nobody should do this at the expenses of the Italian-American community.”
With a population estimated at around 300,000 on Hispaniola when Columbus and his men first landed, 100,000 people perished at the invaders’ hands in just four years, half of whom are believed to have committed mass suicide to escape being killed or captured by them. In 1508 the native population was estimated to be a fifth of what it was before Columbus’ landing, and by 1548, the island was all but ethnically cleansed, with only 500 natives left.
As the Indigenous Peoples’ Day movement continues to grow, support among Italian-Americans for Columbus Day appears less widespread than one might expect, with a recent YouGov poll finding that only 54% of them have a favorable view of him, and 34% have a negative one. The poll also found that across the general population, a majority of respondents over 65 had a favorable view of Columbus, while most respondents 18-29 years old viewed him unfavorably. For Di Michele, this is a failure of education across generations, as according to him, younger Italian-Americans are “receiving a different message at school and at university” that undermines “why Columbus Day became a symbol for the Italian-American.”
Symbolism was indeed key for the Italian diplomat, who at no point defended (or even mentioned) the historical record of Christopher Columbus’ atrocities, instead expressing concern about what his erasure meant for the “over one century and a half” of Italian immigrant culture in this country. For him, the holiday was not even about celebrating Columbus as a historical figure, but rather “claiming the legitimate place in this society for the Italian-Americans and what they have contributed to this society.”
Fabrizio Di Michele has been the Consul General of Italy in New York since 2021, having previously worked in a variety of high-level posts that have taken him around the globe, from Kinshasa to Beijing. He also served in General Directorate for Political and Security Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the Italian Envoy for the International Coalition against ISIL and Syria.
