Italian pride on parade at Huntington's Columbus Day procession

Spectators at the Columbus Day parade in Huntington on Sunday waved small Italian flags as the procession made its way down Main Street: lodges of the Order Sons of Italy in America, high school marching bands and vintage Cadillacs.

The Cavalieri Bolla Pontificia, musicians who marched down Main Street in Huntington village wearing medieval ceremonial costumes and playing drums and long trumpets, traveled from Cava de Tirreni in southern Italy to be part of the parade and the one Monday in Manhattan.

Among the spectators were Jean Ansbro, 84, and her husband, John, 81, of Cold Spring Harbor.

"I’m Italian," Jean Ansbro said before pointing toward her husband, "He’s Irish."

Asked about the parade, she added, "we’re having fun ... I love all of it."

Fun, as much as Italian heritage, was on the minds of many at the parade, organized by Long Island Districts I & II of the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy in America.

Alexa Velez, 10, of Bayville, came with family members to see her cousin play the clarinet with the W.T. Clarke High School marching band from Westbury.

"I’m very excited to come to the parade and watch him play," she said.

The ladders of two fire trucks held a giant American flag in place above the marchers on a mostly sunny Sunday. The procession ended at Heckscher Park, where the Long Island Fall Festival, which began Friday, continued. 

Huntington Supervisor Ed Smyth and Biagio Isgro Jr., state president of the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy in America, also sponsored the parade.

On its website, Huntington Town has described the annual event as an "ideal backdrop to celebrate Italian heritage, culture and the vast contributions made in the country by people of Italian ancestry."

Columbus Day has been celebrated for well over a century across the country and has been a federal holiday since 1971.

The explorer set out from Spain in 1492 on an expedition sponsored by Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II, with the aim of finding a passage to the Far East and landed in what is now the Bahamas 10 weeks later. He later traveled to Cuba, Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and to the Central and South American coasts, but never set foot in the present day United States.

But his legacy as an explorer has been darkened over the decades as historians have chronicled the annihilation of Native peoples that resulted.

In 2021, President Joe Biden recognized the first Indigenous Peoples' Day, like Columbus Day, set for Monday. It recognizes and honors the Native people who already lived in North America before the Europeans arrived and, during that era and since, suffered "violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror," Biden wrote at the time.

Along the parade route Sunday, an Italian American family from Northport acknowledged that celebrating Columbus Day is complicated.

"[Columbus] was a bad guy," Sabrina Genovese, 25, said.

Her mother, Jodi Genovese, 56, referring to other revered historic figures: "A lot of them were bad guys. Or at least, there was good and bad in all of them."