“Grazie a tutti”. Bill De Blasio used the mother tongue of his grandparents, who came to the United Stated from the South of Italy almost a century ago, to thank the Italian community who chose him as the 109th mayor of New York, the nation’s largest city. He will take office next year, on January 1, as the fourth Italian-American N.Y. mayor after Fiorello La Guardia (1934–45), Vincent Impellitteri (1950–53) and Rudolph Giuliani (1994–2001).
His surname is Italian and his mother’s relatives are too. His paternal grandparents, Giovanni De Blasio and Anna Briganti, came from Sant’Agata de’ Goti, in the province of Benevento (not too far from Naples) where the next mayor still has cousins. His maternal grandmother came from Grassano, near Matera, the Unesco city where in 2004 Mel Gibson set his “The Passion of the Christ”.
All these elements explain why Italy followed this U.S. election day with great interest. When De Blasio was proclaimed the winner, the small southern Italian town he last visited three years ago organized parties to celebrate, and the city council decided to make New York’s mayor an honorary citizen of Sant’Agata de’ Goti.
Bill De Blasio has been elected New York City’s first Democratic mayor in two decades, receiving 73 percent of the vote compared with 24 percent for Republican Joe Lhota, former chief of the area’s metropolitan transit agency. De Blasio ran as the anti-Bloomberg, who first ran as a Republican and later became an independent, and who guided the city through the financial meltdown and the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
During the last Columbus Day Parade De Blasio appeared waving an Italian flag and, at the end, in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood that was once the heart of Brooklyn’s Italian-American community, speaking on a stage, he argued that people like himself should be especially proud of their immigrant ancestors “who struggled to come here under very tough circumstances”.
Promoting an element of his campaign in support of all immigrants, he said: “For all of us who are Italian-American, we should feel a tremendous pride. We should feel pride in everything that Italy has contributed to the world, one of the societies that shaped the world as we know it. The civilization, the culture, everything that came from Italy and framed the world as we know it today should be a point of pride in all of us”.
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