The Italian Heritage and Culture Committee of New York, Inc. (IHCC-NY, Inc.) Board of Directors, led by its president, Comm. Joseph Sciame, is comprised of a volunteer group of leaders of the Italian and Italian American community. They ensure that its mission continues with their promoting, presenting, and preserving Italian and Italian American culture in the Tri-State area. Its annual theme is mirrored by other states in their event programming throughout America.

During 2025, the IHCC-NY, Inc. will host, coordinate, or publicize theme-related presentations, symposiums, exhibits, seminars, a student essay contest, proclamations by every level of government, and tributes to one of the greatest artists and visionaries ever, Michelangelo Buonarroti, so renowned he is known worldwide by his first name alone.

The Committee’s publicly supported educational materials, including theme-related posters, bookmarks, and booklets, will continue to be distributed free to educational, cultural, and public institutions, ensuring the Committee’s ongoing education of the general public about the merits of Italian and Italian American culture.

Five hundred and fifty years ago, March 6, 1475, marks the birth of Michelangelo Buonarotti: sculptor, painter, architect, poet, genius. A contemporary of renowned artists Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, the Perugino, during the height of the Italian Renaissance, there was Michelangelo, a true Renaissance Man, a master in multiple artistic fields.

It is also fitting that Michelangelo, who was a devout Catholic and a member of the Secular Franciscan Order and who depicted great religious figures, would have his 550th birth anniversary during a Jubilee year, which signifies joy, special blessings, and calling for pilgrimage to renew one’s faith. It is also significant that this celebration is in the year that Pope Francis died after a last farewell journey through St. Peter’s Square, passing in front of the Basilica Michelangelo designed and where the first North American Pope, Leo XIV, was chosen in the Sistine Chapel, the sacred place where Popes are elected, surrounded by the Michelangelo ceiling frescoes depicting the Creation of Man and in front of his Last Judgment behind the altar wall. Michelangelo served under nine Popes.

Michelangelo Buonarotti was born in the small village of Caprese, in the Republic of Florence. It was in Florence that he began as an artist’s apprentice at age thirteen. At age fifteen he was living at the Medici palace, where he studied sculpture with Bertolo di Giovanni, under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the powerful ruler of the Florentine republic and the great patron of the Renaissance arts.

From 1501 to 1504, Michelangelo’s amazing artistic ability enabled his sculpting the biblical David, which to this day stands alone in the Rotunda of the Accademia in Florence. When one stands before David, one is in awe of the lifelike details, experiencing the majesty not only of his steadied gaze but also of his anatomy with visible veins and musculature. It is an emotional moment realizing this lifelike figure emerged from one block of marble. One feels the marble come alive, carved by a true genius. Leading up to the David, the corridor is lined by the four Slave-Prisoner statues, those emerging from the stone, as if trying to be free but still bound by the marble, purposefully unfinished to underscore the struggle. Michelangelo’s Pietà, depicting Mary holding the crucified Christ, also evokes its sorrow. This ability to bring forth emotion from the viewer was also genius. To think Michelangelo was only twenty-four years old when he completed this moving depiction.

However, sculpture was not enough. Michelangelo would go on to excel in the painting of the Sistine Chapel, its ceiling frescoes depicting the Creation of Man and other scenes from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament and the Last Judgment, portraying the final judgment of humanity. Millions journey to Rome to see the Vatican, to stand before his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, which cover the walls and the ceiling—the ceiling Michelangelo lay under, bent backward, unbalanced, painting the biblical figures, for two years.

Following the death of the architect Antonio da Sangallo, Pope Paul III entrusted Michelangelo with the design of the new Saint Peter's Basilica, the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. He brought new grandeur especially to the inside of the dome and the outside façade of the Basilica, arising from Michelangelo’s dynamic vision.

Little known is that Michelangelo wrote 330 poems, sonnets, madrigals, and poetic letters, including to the aristocratic religious poet Vittoria Colonna. He wrote of love, piety, mortality, personal and artistic struggles. He was, most of all, a humanist!

He died a few weeks before his 89th birthday, on February 18, 1564, in Rome, Papal States, after an accomplished life as a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. The chisel, the paint brush, the pen, and the words were put to rest, but Michelangelo’s completed visions, their beauty and the emotions they evoked, remain.