Paul Bass Photo
"Labor of love": Sculptor Marc Massaro with his finished product.
After a four-year journey, an Italian-American immigrant family landed in Wooster Square Park on Monday, pointing to both the past and the future.
The family — representing the Italian-American immigrants who settled in New Haven a century ago and transformed Wooster Square into the city’s Little Italy — is depicted in a solid bronze statue entitled “Indicando la via al futuro,” or “Pointing the way to the future.” Volunteers installed the statue near the park’s Chapel Street border to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus that stood on the spot from 1892 until its removal amid violent protests in June 2020.
Bill Iovanne, Jr. and Mike Luzzi, chairs of the committee formed to create the new monument, set out from New Haven at 5:30 a.m. Monday to drive a Chevy Silverado connected to a Belmont trailer to Skylight Studios in Woburn, Mass. They picked up the 1,400-pound solid-bronze statue there, then drove it back to Wooster Square Park. (“We drove very slowly,” Iovanne said.) The volunteer crew installed it within about an hour with the help of a crane from Bay Crane Service of North Haven.
By 2 p.m. the work was done. The new sculpture conveyed a message seeking to celebrate the neighborhood’s ethnic history in a way that envisions a united, not divided, New Haven.
Participants in the four-year process wiped back tears and thought of their ancestors as they gazed on the new monument.
Sculptor Marc Anthony Massaro was among them.
“It took me 14 months to sculpt it,” he said. “This was a labor of love.” Massaro’s grandfather Frank Consiglio came to New Haven with his brothers in 1910. They worked as commercial fishermen and laid down roots here.
Alder Anna Festa thought of her late parents Raymond and Linda Saracco as she fought back tears. Raymond moved here from San Lorenzello, Linda from Amorosi.
The statue’s suitcase “to me represents a suitcase full of dreams,” Festa said. “My parents were the example of the American dream.”
“The message here is not only for people of Italian heritage. This is for everybody that has ancestors that came to the United States,” Massaro reflected. “The most important thing to me is that people of all different ethnic groups can see their family in this … not only my family who were Italians, but all of us.”
Anna Festa: Suitcases full of dreams.
Bill Iovanne, Jr., who helped oversee the approval and installation process.
