The statue of Christopher Columbus on the Statehouse lawn won't be going anywhere anytime soon. Despite protests last year that the monument to the Italian explorer should be taken down like the one that once stood in front of City Hall in his namesake city, members of the board overseeing the Statehouse grounds Thursday approved a five-year proces...

Courage and Conviction: The True Story of Christopher Columbus is a thorough examination of the life and legacy of the fearless discoverer of America. Through expert interviews and archival footage, we look at the origins of Columbus Day and the symbolic role that Columbus has for Catholic immigrants, especially Italian Americans. Finally, the film...

For years, the celebration of Columbus Day went on without protest in Wellesley, which has a substantial population of people of Italian-American descent. But more recently, there has been a hard-fought battle to replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day. The March 2 ballot contains a referendum on the issue. "The referendum results are to inform the...

The City of Chicago, in a release distributed on February 17, 2021, launched the Chicago Monuments Project website at chicagomonuments.org kicking off the public engagement phase of the Chicago Monuments Project. The new website identifies monumental sculptures, artworks, and commemorative plaques on the public way and in Chicago parks selected by...

There is a portrait of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli standing next to philosopher Marsilio Ficino, one of the foremost minds of the Italian Renaissance. In it, Toscanelli appears as a mysterious man. He wears a turban embroidered alla moresca — in the Moorish-style — in a 15th-century Florence committed to fighting against the Turks. But who was Paolo...

Statues of Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, as well as the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, were among the 41 public statues and other commemorative markers identified on a list from Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration on Wednesday for further review as part of “a racial healing and historical reckoning pr...

The recommendation by a city of Providence committee: the Christopher Columbus statue must go. For good. The statue had stood next to Elmwood Avenue in South Providence until last Summer. That's when the mayor had it temporarily removed and put in storage after it became a lightning rod for the social unrest sweeping the country. The at-first tempo...

Dear Mayor Kenney, The Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations is a coalition of the 50 largest and most influential Italian American organizations throughout our country. On behalf of all of our member organizations I write to express our collective shock and indignation concerning your insulting and divisive Executive Ord...

The question of whether or not to rename the Columbus Elementary School had many residents tuning in the most recent School Committee meeting. The discussion, however, was pushed back to early March. “Clearly people thought we might be changing it,” member Pauline Van der Kloot said during the Feb. 8 meeting, in reference to e-mails and letters she...

For Ron Onesti, the president of Chicago’s Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s decision to remove the city’s three statues of Christopher Columbus after violent protests was a bitter pill to swallow.While most of the media attention focused on the city’s overnight removal of the explorer’s statue in Grant Park, Onesti...