A Brief History of

Italian Heritage and Culture Month

New York’s Italian Heritage and Culture Month celebrates its thirty-second anniversary this year, 2008. Providing more than a quarter century of special events, concerts, exhibits, lectures, and proclamations to celebrate and to better inform all of New York, the largest Italian city outside Italy, of an important part of its cosmopolitan culture.

In the spring of 1976, Mayor Abraham Beame, of New York City, proclaimed the first Italian Culture Week, from May 17 to 23. Nine years later, in 1985, the festivities moved to October, to coincide with the Columbus Day celebrations. By then, a week had become too short to contain the entire program, so from that year on Italian Culture Week became Italian Culture Month – ultimately to become Italian Heritage and Culture Month.

This quarter century of celebration grew out of an idea from Dr. Angelo Gimondo, then President of the Italian Bilingual Educators Association and now Superintendent of School District 30 in New York City. Since then, uninterruptedly, Dr. Gimondo has been at the head of the group of volunteers who coordinate the celebration of Italian heritage and culture in the five boroughs of New York.

In promoting a week of the Italian language and culture, Dr. Gimondo found a like mind and enthusiasm in Rosamaria Riccio Pietanza, then President of the Italian Teachers Association. In 1976, the two colleagues proposed the idea to Dr. Leo Bernardo, Director of the Bureau of Foreign Languages, who was easily persuaded of the usefulness and importance of the project. Dr. Bernardo appointed Dr. Gimondo citywide coordinator, and the first celebration of Italian Culture Week thus saw the light under the auspices of the Bureau of Foreign Languages of the Board of Education of the City of New York.

Soon, after inception, the idea to dedicate each year’s event to a specific theme or personality representative of the history and culture of Italy and Italian Americans evolved.

The Board of Directors of the Italian Heritage and Culture Committee of New York, Inc. is composed of eminent representatives of New York’s Italian and Italian American community. Each year the Board of Directors selects a new theme and then proceeds to create a theme poster and publish a “Calendar of Events.” The role of the Board of Directors has always been to promote, coordinate, and manage the month long celebration.

Today, a multitude of programs and events are organized by cultural associations, community centers, libraries, schools, and university departments of Italian in the New York metropolitan area to proudly “Celebrate October … Italian Heritage and Culture Month.”