22/06/2026
We are pleased to share a new article by our Director, Professor Stefano Albertini, published in the Italian magazine ICON. In this reflection, he traces the layered presence of Italians in New York through monuments, stories, and unexpected traces that continue to shape the city’s identity.
At the same time, this publication offers the occasion to relaunch our web series Nuova York. Hidden in Plain Sight, filmed by Eugenio Pizzorno, which explores precisely these “hidden geographies” of Italian New York. In the series, viewers will find dedicated episodes expanding on many of the places and figures mentioned in the article.
EMINENT FIGURES, HERETICS, AND A BULL
by Stefano Albertini
New York's monuments to celebrated Italians tell only part of the story of the great emigration to America.
I have lived in New York for 32 years. Long enough to know that this city resists possession, and that every attempt to define it says more about the observer than the place itself. For a long time, as an Italian, I came here looking for exactly what Italy was not: distance, rupture, the freedom to reinvent myself somewhere else. Then, gradually and almost without realizing it, I began moving in the opposite direction. I noticed the shift while watching friends who had just arrived from Italy. Their eyes caught things I had long since stopped seeing — a name carved into a building facade, a commemorative plaque, a statue. "Did you know about this?" they would ask. Often I didn't, or I had forgotten. As though New York had been quietly keeping a parallel map all along, scattered with Italian presences that had always been there, waiting for someone to look.
I started walking differently. Reading inscriptions, noting dates, wondering who had decided to place a particular statue in a particular spot, and why. That's how I discovered the Barsotti Five: five monuments dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi, Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and Christopher Columbus, positioned at carefully chosen points across Manhattan. One man was behind all of them: Carlo Barsotti, a banker and, more importantly, the publisher of the Progresso Italo-Americano, the Italian-language daily that at the turn of the twentieth century reached tens of thousands of immigrants. Through its pages, Barsotti organized public subscription drives to fund these statues, with a clear purpose: to plant Italian identity visibly in New York's public landscape. It was an ambitious project — challenged by an Anglo-Saxon establishment wary of such conspicuous symbolic claims, and challenged from within as well, by members of the Italian community who felt the money would have been better spent on schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Nothing about the placement was accidental. Columbus presides over Columbus Circle, at Central Park's southwest corner. Verrazzano gazes toward the bay he was the first European to describe. Garibaldi holds court in Washington Square. Dante stands across from Lincoln Center. And Verdi watches over a space his own presence helped redeem: once a neglected patch known as Vermin Square, it is today a small, thriving urban garden. Each statue was a deliberate act of inscription — a way of saying: we are here, we exist, we count.
Looking at them now, though, what strikes me most is what they leave out. Not one of these figures came from southern Italy, where the vast majority of immigrants originated. Not one reflects the actual texture of that experience — the Atlantic crossing, the overcrowded tenements, the grinding labor. Barsotti had fashioned an Italianness that was elevated and respectable: poets, heroes, navigators. An Italy that educated American society could recognize and admire. The project reveals, almost inadvertently, the enormous distance between the immigrant masses and the distinguished figures put forward to represent them.
Mazzini is a case apart. His bust in Central Park was never part of Barsotti's program — and for good reason. Mazzini was a heresy in the narrative of monarchical, respectable Italy that Barsotti wanted to promote. Yet in New York, his monument predates any in Rome. For a significant portion of the Italian-American community, Mazzini spoke to something more personal: exile, displacement, the hard work of forging an identity far from home. Many immigrants said they only discovered they were Italian after arriving in America.
Then, in 1994, came the monument to Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945 — and with it, a fundamental shift. Italian identity was no longer being represented through symbolic figures imported from across the Atlantic. Here was a man who was entirely American and entirely Italian at once: the son of immigrants who became the most beloved mayor of the world's greatest city. A movement from symbolic assertion to genuine political belonging.
And then there is the most famous and most photographed Italian presence in New York — one that almost no one recognizes as Italian at all. The Wall Street Bull. In December 1989, the Sicilian sculptor Arturo Di Modica rented a truck, loaded a three-ton bronze onto it, and in the middle of the night deposited it in front of the New York Stock Exchange — no permit, no permission, no announcement. The police seized it almost immediately, but the public response was so overwhelming that the authorities relented. The bull stayed. It is still there. Every day thousands of tourists pose beside it, unaware that it is the work of a Sicilian immigrant who simply wanted to give something back to the city that had taken him in. Guerrilla art, yes — but also, in its own way, the most Italian gesture of all.
Thirty-two years ago I came to New York to find a city that was not Italy. Now what I want to understand is how the two are woven together, where they overlap, what persists. Not to recover Italy in New York, but to trace how it was built here — and what it still has to say, to anyone willing to look.
