Italian-American writer Tom Murphy suggests that there are a host of more-deserving forebears that his fellow paesani could be celebrating rather than Christopher Columbus.
Every October, I find myself, a second generation Italian American, wincing at both sides of the Columbus Day discussion.
In one corner, Indigenous Americans rightfully decry the veneration of the man who opened the door to genocide. Further, many Black Americans see Columbus as the man who founded the trans-Atlantic slave trade. On the other hand, many Italians bemoan the diminishment of the one holiday that celebrates our heritage and forebears.
It does not have to be this way.
We need to move past Christopher Columbus without ignoring his rapacious nature and instead celebrate the staggering accomplishments of other paesani.
Fellow Italians, it’s time to give up Columbus Day.
There are few countries and cultures that can boast the towering impact that Italians have made on science, the arts, literature, political science, music, photography, film, cartography, education, communication and more.
The list is staggering, full of seminal creators, influencers, trailblazers and innovators that put their stamp on modern civilization in ways that enhanced our lives in practical and magical ways.
A brief list of these giants features Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Antonio Vivaldi, Marco Polo, Amerigo Vespucci, Enrico Caruso, Federico Fellini, Antonio Stradivari, Niccolo Machiavelli, Enrico Fermi, Maria Montessori and Guglielmo Marconi.
That’s not to mention the unsung, unheralded with their own outsized and underappreciated contributions to modern life.
Antonio Meucci invented the first telephone years before Alexander Graham Bell. (Though Bell sued the poverty-stricken Meucci into oblivion, protecting his patents and becoming the one and only inventor of the telephone that we know today.)
Eugenio Barsanti, along with Felice Matteucci, develop the first internal combustion engine driven by gas in the mid-1800s. (In an echo of Meucci, when Nicholas Otto patented his more-famous engine a few years later, Matteucci sued, but was unsuccessful.)
Giovanni Caselli invented the pantelegraph, an ancestor of the fax machine. There were commercially viable pantelegraphs in the 1860s, leading to a time-warping but true statement often found online, that Abraham Lincoln could have sent a fax to a samurai; all three existed at the same time.
Francesco Cirio developed the method of preserving vegetables in cans. How many would have gone hungry without him?
There are dozens more and not enough space here to catalog them, but foremost among our great Italian forebears is da Vinci — engineer, geologist, botanist, mathematician, scientist, painter and so much more. He is universally recognized as the most diversely talented person to walk the Earth in history.
We do not need to honor Columbus. We should denounce his savagery, avarice and colonizing legacy.
Let us give up the ghost of a pioneering, praiseworthy Columbus and celebrate Indigenous peoples’ origin story and contributions.
We have an all-star roster, waiting in the wings for their rightful moment in the sun, that any culture would proudly call their own. Da Vinci’s birthday is April 15. Maybe we could give Americans something to celebrate that day other than paying their taxes.
Tom Murphy is a second generation (half) Italian-American writer, father and fundraiser for a disaster response nonprofit. He resides in Long Beach, California.
