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After Four Years, New Haven Unveils Its Columbus Replacement

Kapp Singer | June 10th, 2024

After Four Years, New Haven Unveils Its Columbus Replacement

Immigration  |  Public art  |  Arts & Culture  |  Wooster Square  |  Elicker Administration

IMG_7831Marc-Anthony Massaro (front) and Mike Luzzi (back) reveal Indicando la Via al Futuro (Pointing the Way to the Future). Photos Kapp Singer.

With a swift tug, Marc-Anthony Massaro pulled back a yellow cloth sheet. Beneath it lay 1,800 pounds of bronze, cast in the form of a family full of hope. 

On Sunday afternoon, over 100 people gathered in Wooster Square to watch Massaro reveal his sculpture Indicando la Via al Futuro (Pointing the Way to the Future), a rendering of an Italian immigrant family that replaces the Christopher Columbus statue that the city removed from the park in 2020. The unveiling marks the end of a tense four-year process of committee meetings, municipal hurdles and city approvals.

The new statue sits in front of the plinth on which the original was mounted, and the plinth remains. Click here for previous articles about the removal of Columbus, the formation of a monument committee, years of semi-monthly committee meetings, Historic District Commission and architectural hurdles, dueling visions for the space and a vote on the replacement.

IMG_7791Sunday's dedication ceremony.

The sculpture features a young boy, right arm pointing upwards, in the arms of his father. The boy’s older sister stands next to him, wearing a headscarf and holding a book. Behind them is their mother, gazing upwards with her left hand on the shoulder of her daughter and her right on the arm of her husband. 

Sunday’s dedication ceremony featured speeches from a number of public officials, including Mayor Justin Elicker, State Rep. Al Paolillo, State Sen. and President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers, Gov. Ned Lamont, and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro. A member of the Archdiocese of Hartford, Monsignor James Shanley, also spoke.

“It is not a repudiation of the past, but an embrace of the future,” said DeLauro, a member of the Wooster Square Monument Committee who grew up in Wooster Square as the daughter of Italian immigrants. “We must learn and remember the lessons of history, but when it comes to the ideals that we cast in bronze and put in the place of honor within our community—the symbols that we look to for inspiration—I can think of nothing more unifying and galvanizing than this monument.”

IMG_7771U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

Many of the day’s speakers emphasized that the statue represents not just Italian immigrants, but the immigrant experience in America more generally. 

“The committee found a way to bridge cultures and bridge generations,” Elicker said. “Let the work of this group, this design, and this monument to the Italian-American experience serve as a beacon and an inspiration for the continued work we have before us as a city and society to make it just and more inclusive for all.”

IMG_7738Mayor Justin Elicker.

Massaro spent 14 months crafting the sculpture, which was funded through $400,000 of public donations. The Monument Committee chose the design, which beat out five other finalists, through an extensive selection process involving months of Zoom meetings. 
 
The challenge to find a suitable replacement for the Columbus sculpture represents the larger conversations about how to memorialize controversial historical figures that swept the country in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In a nationwide audit conducted in 2021, the nonprofit Monument Lab found that Columbus was the third most common figure honored by public monuments in the U.S., and the Washington Post and MIT found that, between 2018 and 2021, at least 40 such monuments were taken down.

The committee faced numerous hurdles in replacing the statue. In June 2023, a group called the Italian-American Defense League sued the city and Elicker for “unlawful” removal of the original statue, the third lawsuit the city faced over the issue.

“There are people here who I know would have preferred to have kept the Columbus statue up,” said Frank Carrano, a Monument Committee member and founding member of the Wooster Square Italian Immigrant Historical Society. “But I think the fact that they’re here is a recognition of their understanding that what we created here is a very important document that speaks to a very important part of our history.”

IMG_7696Frank Carrano.

In a speech, Monument Committee co-chair Bill Iovanne, Jr. said he was initially “not happy when the statue of Columbus came down,” but eventually came to see that moving forward on a new monument was the best path for the city. 

“Not once did we ever have an argument,” he said of the committee. “We had some discussions, but not once did we have an argument.”

“I couldn’t be prouder of a group of people that have stuck together for four years,” Iovanne added. “We knew that the community was the key to the success of this beautiful sculpture, so we began with the community and the community gave back to us.”

IMG_7863Bill Iovanne, Jr.

One of those community members honored on Sunday was Laura Florio Luzzi, the co-chair of the Committee who died of cancer in September 2022, midway through the process to select a new sculpture.

Five generations of Luzzis came to Sunday’s dedication ceremony.

“This was quite a blessed day of what she was really working for and it’s unfortunate that she’s not here in person,” said her sister Brenda Florio Ruggiero. “There’s a lot of people here today because of her. She couldn’t do enough for her Italian heritage.”