Italian Artist Paints In Grand Central Terminal

Manhattan, May 28, 2018 -

Artist Marco Luccio, who now hails from Australia, creates his own artwork in GCT and paints in the Main Concourse. He performed his painting outside the gate where Amtrak's Empire Service was using New York's Grand Central Terminal during the May 26-September track work in NY Penn Station and Spuyten Duyvil Bridge repair this summer.

His family originally came from Benevento, Italy (near Naples). His website is: www.MarcoLuccio.com.

         Photo and story by Joseph M. Calisi (c)2018 All Rights Reserved

Verrazzano Monument Restored To Glory At Battery Park

Lower Manhattan, October 21, 2015 –

The monument honoring Giovanni da Verrazzano that had been sitting in mothballs for decades, has been restored for the public to enjoy along the northern stretch of Battery Park in Lower Manhattan. On Wednesday, October 21, 2015, the original look to the monument was finally completed. The spelling of the Verrazzano name is correct with a double ‘z’.

According the Parks Department employees on the scene, it took a lot of work to get it back together in original condition as the sculpture designed by Ettore Ximenes that was originally dedicated on October 9, 1909. The original monument had been disassembled and ‘trimmed’ creating a smaller sculpture about two-thirds its original size. The statue ‘Discovery’ had been vandalized and the torch stolen. Utilizing photographs of the original setup, a new torch was built and the complete Verrazzano reattached to its intended design.

To those watching the work being performed, the most common comment made was not the monument itself, but the spelling of the name when compared to the bridge spanning Brooklyn and Staten Island. The Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was born in 1485 at the Castello Verrazzano in Greve which is near Florence, Italy. The French hired him to lead the Duaphine to discover an alternate route to the Far East in 1523. It was on this exploration that Verrazzano became the first European to explore New York Harbor in the New World – well in advance of the Dutch settlement a century later. He explored the east coast of North America and the Carribean before being killed by natives in 1528. His notes called Cellere Codes, is located at the Morgan Library in Midtown Manhattan.

The hiring of Italians to lead exploratory expeditions at the time wasn’t new – the Spaniards hired Christopher Columbus and the English hired Giovanni Cabotto (Anglicized to John Cabot). Venice and Genoa were the leading European traders with the Far East for spices, silk and produce.

The monument has an interesting history. It originally debuted as part of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Carlo Barsotti, the editor of the Progresso Italo-Americano newspaper, conducted a fund-raising effort to honor the explorer. The result of Barsotti’s efforts led to the mounting of the monument near the northeastern entrance of the park and facing New York Harbor where the explorer first saw what is now known as Lower Manhattan.

The newspaper published for over a century.

The monument was removed and placed into storage by the City of New York about 20 years later.

In the early 1950s, the founder of the Italian Historical Society, John N. LaCorte began to clamor for the re-establishment in Battery Park. After not taking no for an answer, it was reassembled as a ‘modernized’ version where the sculpture was reduced in size just to the south of where the fountain near Castle Clinton is located, replacing the New York Aquarium. It was removed for the building of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in the 1940s when depression-era campers set fire to the monument and it went back into storage at the parkhouse near the ferry terminal. In the 1990s, John N. LaCorte’s son took up the reins of bringing the Verrazzano monument back to glory with a new fund-raising effort as well as leading the Italian Historical Society.

The completion of the restoration to glory for the Verrazzano monument this past Wednesday was a long time coming, just in time for the end of Italian History and Culture month.