Folks,

I’m not sure if Italians have much interest or awareness, but for the past year or so (somewhat incongruously, in my opinion, jumpstarted by the Black Lives Matter protests), there has been renewed concern about Columbus statues that Italian-American communities erected all across the U.S.

By way of background, you are certainly aware that, in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, massive waves of Italians (including my grandparents), immigrated to America. The Italians faced harsh treatment, with the worst event likely being the summary execution of several Italians in New Orleans in 1891. These extrajudicial killings caused a minor international incident, and in reaction to this and other incidents, Italians sought to raise statues of Columbus, an “Italian” and the “discoverer of America” (then a mostly revered figure, but for in indigenous communities), to show their connection to their new homeland. Of course, times change, as well as our understanding of history and Columbus, and there has been a renewed push (which I feel is somewhat justified) by indigenous communities and their allies to have these statues removed. Of course, I am somewhat sympathetic to the Italian-Americans as well, as they certainly did not intend to praise Columbus’s horrible treatment of natives.

In any event, with that lengthy background on the issue, my particular concern relates to the Columbus statue in my native Pittsburgh. This statue was created by Italian born sculptor, Frank Vittor. Vittor was born in Mazzate, Como, a suburb of Milan in 1888, and he came to America in 1906. Vittor had public commissions all over our city, and he sculpted busts of many famous people of the day, including Benito Mussolini. I am not certain of the exact time period of his Mussolini bust, but he already had (or had completed) the commission by 1931. Further, I find no evidence that Vittor supported the Italian fascists, and in fact, one of his benefactors was a prominent local Jewish businessman (in fact, Vittor even won a prize from the Italian government in 1933 for his bust of this benefactor).

Nevertheless, when I look at Pittsburgh’s Columbus statue, I can’t rule out the possibility that the sculptor used Il Duce’s face as the model for Columbus. What do you think:

[https://youtu.be/41yZ44FVYzw](https://youtu.be/41yZ44FVYzw)

35 comments

  1. The statue removal is kind of dumb… For example we have lots of Giulio Cesare statues in italy and he did worse things than C. Colombo.

    Colombo statues should be about the celebration of the discovery of america and the connection between the italian comunity and the american one.

    Btw your founding fathers were slave owners… how is that they get a free pass?

    To conclude, if you judge hystoric figures with modern morals you will find out that probably 99% of them were pieces of shit (and probably in the future the same will be said about us, as today we pollute and exploit labor in poor countries)

  2. It’s hard to tell from the video. The camera angle is way too low to get a good glimpse of the statue’s face.
    That said, it’s probable that the bust and statue were sculpted in the same style, which was quite popular at the time.

    Regarding whether or not the artist supported Mussolini, we might as well assume that he did.

    Jews (in Italy) weren’t persecuted until 1938. You can read more about it [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_racial_laws), so him receiving an award and being openly supportive of Jews doesn’t exclude the possibility that he was a fascist.

    Columbus isn’t a historical figure which is celebrated in Italy in any way. Amerigo Vespucci, on the other hand, deserves more credit.
    Still, I don’t get how removing a stone statue is going to fix whatever social issues you’ve got going on over there.

  3. Why stop at the statues tho? The “C” in Washington DC stands for Columbia. Do you really want to have a capital whose name pays an homage to a killer ? You should change into Washington District of Washingtonia

  4. About statues:

    First of all, we don’t care.

    Second, this is dumb af. You should coherently destroy Mt. Rushmore or rewrite your constitution, made by slave owners. (You should because it’s old anyway, but that’s another point)

    Moreover, you talk about Columbus genocides, in 1500, and yet genocides continued until at least 1800, like srsly Washington himself fought against natives, not even talking about Asian slavery, I’m really amazed how you can be so blind, but whatever

    About the sculptor:

    Even if he was fascist that’s not a bad thing. You’re talking about a man, living on the other side of the planet that only knows that there is a dude in Italy thats doing good stuff. How could he possibly know that it was just propaganda and overall leading to fascism?

    Also, a lot of Italians appreciated fascism, you need to remember (or study) the age we’re talking about, egocentric kings, internal conflicts, just out from WW1 and Spanish flu, ww1 veterans considered like shit, it was just obvious that a figure like Mussolini would came, and in 1920 he was just an elementary teacher that seemed to care

    Moreover, Mussolini started anti Jewish propaganda in 1938 (and mostly because pressured by hitler) so this whole period

    > I am not certain of the exact time period of his Mussolini bust, but he already had (or had completed) the commission by 1931. Further, I find no evidence that Vittor supported the Italian fascists, and in fact, one of his benefactors was a prominent local Jewish businessman (in fact, Vittor even won a prize from the Italian government in 1933 for his bust of this benefactor).

    Makes little sense, fascism anti semitic propaganda started many years laters

  5. I have a better idea. Why don’t we keep cancel culture and woke-inspired history revisionism contained in the US?

  6. I think that that’s a terrible video and I can’t see anything but it doesn’t seem Mussolini. About Columbus I don’t think Italians really care that he was Italian so you do whatever you want.

  7. As others already said, there’s plenty of historical statues of Roman emperors and Roman symbols around the world and besides doing great things they also did far worse stuff than Columbus ever could.

    And I’m sure indigenous chiefs and tribes around the world also weren’t shy about shedding blood. The Aztecs based their culture on imperialism of other tribes and human sacrifice, with a sprinkling of casual slavery of their own citizens if needed, but I don’t think anyone would ever dare to destroy their monuments or statues.

    Cancelling history is a really really dumb and ignorant stance.

  9. “Como, a suburb of Milan”

    I don’t know if the inhabitants of Como and its province do care about Colombo’s statues removal, but there’s a sure thing: they now want your head! 🤣

  10. I never understand why people are so triggered at the removal of a piece of stone/metal

    Don’t want to do whataboutism but I think removing psychopath genocidal Andrew Jackson from the 20 is a bit more important

  11. My response of state removal is “esticazzi” or in Engish “whatever, dude”.
    I think that once one has removed the statue of a person dead centuries ago, feels better and think tha has done the right thing. But the problem that affect minorities in the US are remaining the same. Cops getting away harassin and beating citizen, the civil forfeiture and the fact there’s not a Medicare-for-all or what is called in UK, NHS I think are way bigger problem for minorities rather an old lump of stone.

  12. I find your phrase “of course times change, as well as our understanding of history” disturbing.

    Huxley said that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history and this is the most important of all the lessons of history.
    We will never learn if we keep rewriting or deleting it.

  13. I find it quite amusing seeing Italians get so defensive whenever Christopher Columbus gets mentioned. It’s also ironic that people complain about PC and “woke SJW” culture yet they get riled up about a statue getting removed from the town square of a random US city…

  14. Just a heads up – this subreddit isn’t very balanced in political leaning, so the answers you’ll get won’t necessarily reflect the opinions of italians in general.

    If anybody here said they like statues being removed they’d probably get downvoted into oblivion, although there is a part of italians (albeit a minority) that is in favor of it.

  15. I do believe that Columbus has little to do with America being the fucked up country that’s right now and moving the focus to scapegoats will probably not help changing things for the good. I also do not think there are many historical figures free from guilt when it comes to human rights violation and many people who did good, maybe even shaped even our lives also did bad in their times. You can’t judge people by your standards if they lived about500 hundreds years before yourself.

    Anyway something that really threw me off is how good people are at calling bad Columbus but they don’t laugh at how thanksgiving day is a ridiculous display of hypocrisy, given how the first Americans kinda butchered every indigenous they found on their way. I guess that’s cool, that isn’t worthy of the cancel treatment.

  16. first of all, if you write or speak to an Italian you have to use Italian (as in “strongly suggested”), because many here don’t speak English or don’t speak it well, so saying something more complicated than “the cat is on the table” for an italian *often* becomes difficult or impossible ;).

    (You can use english of course, but you risk that people won’t answer you because they don’t know English)

    Long story short, the sculptor perhaps had the party card (and perhaps not) as the 3/4 of the nation and most likely was unaware of what crap fascism was.

    When asked about the relationship between the sculptor and fascism, I can answer briefly that until a certain year, fascism was considered by many to be a tax that had to be paid in order not to have problems or to have a better career, for the rest the average Italian. at the time, considered fascism a free show that the regime provided, with the local party’s leading exponent periodically demonstrating physical agility while being overweight.

    Then, obviously, very few knew the enormous dark side of fascism, also because the regime controlled everything.

    To get a very vague idea of ​​what life was like under fascism [you must see this film](https://www.google.com/search?q=il+federale&rlz=1C1GCEU_itIT822IT822&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwih3pufjMzzAhXS8qQKHVE7BJcQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1600&bih=789&dpr=1), even if it is in Italian.

    (Como is not a suburb of Milan)

    (And removing a statue solves nothing)

  18. Columbus is not that celebrated here, we know that he was Italian of course but I’ve never heard of someone with a particular attachment to him (maybe in Genoa is more praised, I don’t know) so if someone is against this thing of removing his statues is because they don’t want to remove any statue imo. Personally I find stupid the idea of blaming him for the deaths of indigenous peoples in America, it’s sad to say but they would have died even without him

  19. >Nevertheless, when I look at Pittsburgh’s Columbus statue, I can’t rule out the possibility that the sculptor used Il Duce’s face as the model

    So what? Relax dude, it’s just a statue. Is it good? Is it bad? These are the questions you should ask yourself when you are confronted with art. Not weird unrelated facts about the author. If we as a society decided to burn all Caravaggio’s paintings because he killed a guy would we be better people?
    Do you remember when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues ? At which point cancel culture becomes that?

  20. Yeah dude we’re really fuckin’ concerned about statues here,i’m literally shaking rn just thinking at that ebil natzee sculptor,how are we ever gonna recover from this???

    I hate America so fuckin’ much it’s unreal bros

  23. Statues are meant to celebrate, taking down statues is a statement that certain things shouldn’t be celebrated. A statue of Columbus in Italy signifies a celebration of explorers, important figures in Italian history. On the other hand, think about what a statue of Columbus would convey in Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), where the settlement of Europeans directly caused by his voyages caused centuries of slavery and genocide. What about the US? The legacy of Columbus is mixed. Should he be revered as a saint? Hell no. Should they take down his statue? If that’s what citizens want, why not? An approach I consider compelling is what they did to Nazi Germany monuments, which is leaving them standing but surrounding them with *context*, be it signs, art installations, plaques or whatever to describe why they shouldn’t be considered a positive part of their history.

  24. The statue doesn’t look at all like mussolini.
    Are you implying we all look alike?

    And destroying statues is not woke culture but 2000 taliban culture

  26. Wow, thanks for all the comments! Here are some general responses:

    ​

    1. To be clear, I personally would never have initiated an effort to remove the statue; however, the issue was put forward by an activist portion of the population, and then, at least in Pittsburgh, the issue was considered by the government apparatus, i.e., our city council, the mayor, and our “art commission,” which made a recommendation that the statue should be removed.
    2. Many certainly make good “slippery slope” arguments about where such removal efforts are to stop (up to and including renaming of cities named after Founding Fathers). That is certainly a salient point. At least one historian has argued that these figures must be judged by “the standards of their times,” and while, for example, Washington’s enslavement was consistent with other Founding Fathers, Columbus, by contrast, was particularly heinous even for the standards of the 15th Century. At a basic level, I think such decisions should be made through democratic processes, and not, however, as a capitulation to whatever protest movement is currently in favor.
    3. On the video, sorry for the quality; I have to confess that the whole Mussolini angle is a bit of a joke, and I am just connecting a few factual threads (i.e., the artist did sculpt a bust of Mussolini, and the face is “generic” enough such that you can’t definitely say that it isn’t Mussolini). Further, I don’t think all Italians look the same; however, if Italians did look the same, I think it would be good if they all looked like Chielini, who is one handsome motherf-cker.
    4. On the artist’s birthplace, I just reproduced what was written by our local papers in his obituary in 1968.
    5. I apologize that I am woefully underinformed on the rise of fascism generally in Italy (my grandparents were both gone by 1910, never to return; they were very poor peasants from Campagna). However, notwithstanding the fact that Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws date from later in the 1930s, it appears that some artists, e.g., Toscanini, were opposing the rise of fascism from as early as 1931 (a report from this year indicates that Toscanini was roughed up after refusing to conduct the fascist anthem).
    6. Ultimately, I, too, find this issue a bit absurd, and this post is a bit of a nod to that absurdity. That said, whether we Americans find the issue ridiculous or not, the movements to remove these statues are continuing, and accordingly, it behooves us to take some position on the issue.

    Thank you again for providing your thoughts on this topic. Ciao!

  28. Not commenting on the absurd attachment to Columbus from Americans of Italian origins. I do remember watching the protest in Pittsburgh that got this statue covered (it was early in the days after George Floyd’s murder).

    Apart from that, Pittsburgh is full of hidden fascist statues and architecture! I always assumed it was due to the high number of immigrants from the fascist period.

    One of the hardest ones to spot: Italian room in Pitt’s [cathedral](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationality_Rooms). It’s right above the entrance.

  31. I wanna remember you that Columbus is a navigator not a ruler. What rulers did has nothing to do with him.
    Let me put it this way: “is Hitler’s doctor the reason millions of people died or is it due to Hitler?”. Of course it is the latter, so why do Americans attribute the fault to him. Also is not like the American rulers had nothing to do with what happened back then.

  33. Why would i give a shit if some americans get angry at other americans about some statues? For what concerns me, italian-americans are not italians. I dont think any italian gives a shit if some statues are erected/tore down in the other part of the world.

  34. Comunque ragazzi noi giustamente diciamo “chi cazzo se ne frega delle statue” ma fino a due settimane fa io vedevo sui social ogni 4 post un commento di qualche personaggio pubblico sulla spigolatrice eh. Secondo me i giornali scrivono ste troiate perchè si son resi conto che la gente ama guardare sti teatrini

  35. I believe destroying art is never good, no matter how noble you say your cause is, pull it down, store it in a warehouse, or in museum if you don’t like it, but destroying art is pure barbarism

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