By Stefano Pitrelli, Washington Post
ROME — While many Christopher Columbus statues were toppled this year in the United States — dragged into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, beheaded in Boston — the towering marble monument to the explorer in his hometown, Genoa, Italy, is disturbed only by pigeons.
As Americans feud over whether Columbus Day should remain a federal holiday — or whether the man who first charted the transatlantic route in 1492 should be remembered as a colonial oppressor — in Italy, Columbus is still held in high esteem. Italians tend to think of him as the sum of their best qualities: ingenuity, courage and resilience.
“Columbus represents genocide,” protesters wrote in Richmond after throwing a Columbus statue into a lake. In Italy, that’s just not the case.
The disconnect might have to do with a lack of knowledge among Italians about the more objectionable aspects of Columbus’s life and legacy. But scholars say there’s also a national defensiveness that has gotten in the way of further understanding.
Editor’s note: Columbus Day is a federal holiday in 2020 and also a state holiday in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, but not in Delaware.
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