On today’s day, the Italian Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli, visiting New York, decided to celebrate the figure of Christopher Columbus, Italian navigator and explorer famous to be above all the first to have embarked on the Atlantic route through which America was discovered.
During his visit to the statue of Christopher Columbus, built in 1892 and also named the circular square where it is, the Columbus Circle in Manhattan, the Minister Giuli, in the company of the General Consul in New York Giuseppe Pastorelli and the Italian Ambassador in Washington Marco Peronaci, laid a crown with a brief official ceremony accompanied by the military greeting of some Carabinieri present.
At the New York microphones, Giuli commented as a colombo as “an element of great wealth for the United States. The presence and memory of Christopher Columbus is recognized at the highest levels in America by the American people and its institutions. But it is the American people who see in Colombo and the Italians who live in America a presence that has enriched American identity for centuries and this makes us all very happy: it is the right thing at the right time, what we are doing».
In the United States, the figure of Christopher Columbus has long been at the centre of a debate on how some passages of national history are represented. Since the 1990s, and with greater intensity in recent years, a part of American historiography and political scene has questioned Columbus as an exclusively positive figure, underlining its role in the start of European colonization and the consequences for indigenous peoples.
In many American cities, especially after 2020, some statues dedicated to Colombo have been vandalized and, in some cases, even removed from the municipalities themselves because they are considered controversial. At the same time, the Columbus Day, a federal festival of the United States, which, since 1937, commemorates the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the American continent and is a feast very felt by the Italian American communities in the USA, has been in some cases – and however not at the federal level – replaced or flanked by the Indigenous Peoples’ Day, an event to recognize and preserve the history of Native American communities.
Christopher Columbus continues to represent a historical symbol of great pride for the Italian communities, because it binds itself to all those processes of integration and social recognition that our communities have faced between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And this is why the visit and the brief ceremony of Minister Giuli takes on particular importance, for the historical memory and identity of the tens of thousands of Italians and Italian Americans present in New York as well as in the United States.
L’articolo The Minister of Culture Juli lays a crown on the statue of Christopher Columbus proviene da IlNewyorkese.
