Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not march up Fifth Avenue on October 12. Last night, he opened the doors of Gracie Mansion instead. The Italian Heritage reception he hosted on Tuesday evening was his answer to the criticism from Italian-American organizations, and his way of restating a point he had made in a video for Italian American Heritage Month: the history of Italians in New York is the history of New York itself.

Before the Mayor spoke, Carlo Scissura, President of the New York Building Congress and one of the City's best-known Italian-American voices, warmed up the room. Mamdani, he joked, is practically Italian: his last name ends in a vowel, and he loves the bidet. The line drew knowing laughter from guests who remembered the Mayor's January pledge to install bidets at Gracie Mansion, a fixture of every Italian bathroom and still a curiosity in most American ones.

The evening also carried a family link to the house itself. Gracie Mansion became the official Mayoral residence in 1942, and its first occupant was Fiorello La Guardia, the New York-born son of Italian immigrants and still, for many, the City's greatest Mayor. More than eighty years later, his great-granddaughter took the floor in the same rooms to speak about his legacy. Mamdani began by greeting the Italian diplomats in the room, Ambassador Giorgio Marrapodi, Italy's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and Consul General Giuseppe Pastorelli, and, after stumbling over the Italian pronunciation, conceded: "I'm a work in progress, but I'm working."

Then he went back to a less celebrated chapter of the story. He described the Sicilians of Elizabeth Street, the Neapolitans of Mulberry, the Calabrians of East 109th Street, and the prejudice that met them everywhere. "Landlords refused to rent to them. Restaurants would not serve them. Colleges and universities would not admit them," he said. Barred out of factories and employment offices, they took on the hardest jobs. "So much of the infrastructure that connects our city today was built by Italian hands". From Mother Cabrini to La Guardia to Martin Scorsese, he went on, Italian New Yorkers "were told that they were too foreign, too different, too working-class to be great," and achieved greatness anyway. He found that legacy in the Piccirilli brothers' lions outside the New York Public Library, in the Feast of San Gennaro, and on Arthur Avenue, where the lasagna is "so good it prompts an existential crisis". It was a speech about immigrants delivered by the City's first Muslim and first South Asian mayor, himself born in Uganda to Indian parents, and he tied it to his own agenda: today, he said, it has become harder for Italian New Yorkers to stay in the City they worked so hard to build.

Before closing, Mamdani singled out a familiar face in the crowd: Anthony Di Mieri, the Brooklyn-born Italian-American filmmaker who was part of the video team behind his campaign, and whom La Stampa interviewed last year. Many of the videos that introduced him to New Yorkers, the Mayor said, would not have been made "were it not for the Italian hands of the man right there." Then he signed off with a "grazie."