Columbus Is Now An Italian American Myth. Let’s Name The Day After Someone Else.

New Jersey Monitor

October 14, 2025

While living in Italy this summer, I made a trip to Genoa to see Christopher Columbus’s birthplace. It’s a small building, and wasn’t very crowded. The guide spent more time describing a structure in the courtyard, which, to him, held more historical significance than the house itself.

This might surprise Americans, given the brouhaha about Columbus Day here. But like pasta primavera and the Feast of the Seven Fishes, Columbus Day is largely an Italian American invention. We should rename the holiday to reflect that it’s about us, and not some long-dead guy whose “discovery” led to the deaths of millions.

Yes, of course, Italians recognize that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. In Italy, it’s called Giornata nazionale di Cristoforo Colombo, but it’s not a national holiday and certainly doesn’t carry the same pomp and circumstance as the dozens of saint-dedicated feast days celebrated at different levels of intensity, depending on where you are in the country.

Columbus Day celebrations started here in 1792, and were pushed as a way to combat then-intense anti-Italian and anti-Catholic sentiments. Most of this work was done at the state level until 1891, when 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans. In 1892, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, President Benjamin Harris made Columbus Day a one-time, national thing.

The big movement to make it a national holiday came in 1934 at the behest of the Knights of Columbus, which led to a proclamation by Franklin D. Roosevelt — but not a national holiday (this was the same president who oversaw the internment of nearly 2,000 Italians during World War II). The federal holiday designation came in 1971, set for the second Monday in October.

By this time, Columbus Day was less about a man whose four voyages to the Americas led to the genocide of indigenous peoples and the creation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and more about a mythologized figure who served as a backdrop for recognizing the accomplishments and contributions Italian immigrants have made to this country.

The current pro-Columbus Day push is part of a larger backlash against any gains made since 2020 by people who are not straight, white Christian males. In April, President Trump said that Columbus Day needs to make a “major comeback” despite it never going away, and last week signed a proclamation to reclaim the explorer’s legacy. Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli has pledged to “save” Columbus Day — which, again, hasn’t disappeared in a cloud of rainbow-colored woke smoke.

This summer, the “Columbus Heritage Coalition,” a group who says its mission is to support the celebration of Columbus Day and has a map on its website targeting communities that have renamed the holiday, used an old tweet by New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani opposing the presence of a Columbus statue to try to hurt his election chances by saying he’s “exclusionary” for wanting to take it down.

Mamdani is Muslim and was born in Uganda, so it’s not a surprise that he’d become a target of people using Columbus as a conduit to point at someone else and scream they are now the “other.” It’s part of a long tradition of those who were once persecuted becoming the aggressor.

It’s not like I’m not proud to be Italian. I’ve been learning the language for more than three years, and on this past summer trip, I rented a Fiat 500 and drove up a steep mountain on tiny, twisty roads to meet the branch of my Italian family who still live there. I didn’t do these things for my health. I did so because where I come from is important to me.

But Columbus Day in name has to go. If we want to keep the holiday but rename it after someone with questionable values, that’s fine. Pick an actual Italian American. Let’s rename the second Monday in October Frank Sinatra Day. At least he won an Oscar.

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