For Vincenzo Taibi, Columbus Day is an annual celebration of Italian heritage, and the parade through downtown Chicago is a cherished tradition. When he was growing up, his non-Italian classmates might have seen the day off from school as a chance to sit at home and watch cartoons, but the Norwood Park resident and his family headed without fail to watch marching bands and Sinatra-style crooners cruise through the heart of the city.
Now 27, Taibi remains untroubled by controversy over a holiday many link to the legacy of Christopher Columbus and those who followed him to the Americas and the effect they had on indigenous people.
“Columbus Day is about celebrating our Italian heritage. This is the one day where we get to show who we really are,” Taibi said as he milled around near the parade staging area on Wacker Drive with his mother, restaurateur Margie Taibi. Taibi sported a “Hardcore Sicilian” sweatshirt, his mother a blue jacket with “ITALIA” stitched across in 12-inch letters.
The parade returned to downtown last year after a two-year pandemic hiatus and has largely returned to its pre-pandemic size, said Pasquale Gianni, president of Avanti, the young professionals organization of event organizer the Joint Committee of Italian-Americans-Chicago.
This year marked the 70th year of the parade in Chicago, which has the third-largest Italian-American population in the U.S., with the half-million Chicagoans of Italian descent trailing only New York and Philadelphia in size.
All told, more than 110 groups had slots in the parade, including an increasing number of organizations representing other immigrant ethnic groups — Gianni said, reflecting a shift toward celebrating Columbus as the first among the waves of immigrants to the Americas.
Marching alongside longtime Columbus Day parade participants like the Knights of Columbus and the Italian-American Executives of Transportation on Monday were the Filipino-American Society of South DuPage, traditional Mexican dance troupe Ballet Folklorico, and the Wat Dhammaram Academy of Thai Classical Music.
“That’s as it should be, a celebration of the immigrant experience in America,” Gianni said, noting that a bill passed in 2017 made the last Monday in September as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Illinois.
“There are 364 other unoccupied days on the calendar to celebrate, there is no reason that you have to step on the back of one group to elevate another group,” Gianni said.
Despite the tension and occasional violence that have attended protests at monuments to Columbus and early 20th century Italian aviator Italo Balbo, the parade concluded without event — a group of protesters with a banner that read “Italian Americans Give Columbus the Boot” was briefly displayed along the State Street route.
Lenny DiCristofano, whose 2004 Ferrari 360 Modena Spider was in the middle of a phalanx of Fiats, Alfa-Romeos and Lamborghinis near the end of the parade, was glad for the opportunity to celebrate his Italian heritage on a sunny fall day, even if meant adding to the 2,200 miles on his odometer.
“This is just a celebration of a guy, Columbus, who took a risk and made a great discovery,” the Park Ridge resident said. “That other stuff, we don’t worry about.”
