At the end of his speech at last week's Italian Heritage reception at Gracie Mansion, Mayor Zohran Mamdani paused to point at a man in the crowd. Many of the videos that first 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." The man was Anthony Di Mieri. 

Di Mieri, whom La Stampa interviewed last year, is a Brooklyn-born and raised Italian American who studied history and communications at Fordham and learned production at Democracy Now. He is a co-founder of Melted Solids, a creative agency specializing in video content for progressive candidates and organizations that has helped elect a number of NYC candidates and the creative studio behind the video side of Mamdani's campaign: the short, sharp, very New York clips that turned an Astoria assemblyman into a worldwide phenomenon. The best known of them began as a pun. When Mamdani told him that rent freeze would be at the heart of his platform, Di Mieri's first idea was to send the candidate into the icy Atlantic for the New Year's Day plunge, a ritual every New Yorker knows. Communications director Andrew Epstein shot it on an iPhone, both men in thrift-store suits.

For Di Mieri, the lesson was about roots: a campaign's channels should feel like the city itself, its culture, its streets, its geography, its people. A message that proved to be winning and that has now crossed the Atlantic. Last October, Di Mieri and his business partner at Melted Solids Debbie Saslaw were in Rome as guests of the Italian Senate, at a meeting convened by Democratic Party Senator Filippo Sensi on how to talk to voters about affordability. Around the table was also Daniele Cinà, Head of Digital Communications for Rome's Mayor Roberto Gualtieri, who is preparing to run for a second term. Di Mieri's advice to the Italian left was simple: start from people's basic needs (housing, health, work, time, getting around) and fight to make them affordable. He urged progressives to be more efficient, to keep their program short and concrete, to back small businesses, and to build a shared language that can unite working-class voters, the middle class and immigrants alike. He is wary, though, of worshipping virality. "Not every politician needs to become a meme," he said in an interview.

Despite the success of the Mamdani’s campaign, politics is not his first love. Cinema is, and Italian cinema above all: Di Mieri is a passionate fan of the films of his ancestors' homeland, from Federico Fellini's dreamlike Rome to the blood-red nightmares of Dario Argento. He is also the writer and director of Love New York, his debut feature, an ensemble "anti-rom-com" that follows a tangle of messy relationships across the five boroughs. It premiered with a sold-out crowd at the Downtown Festival in October 2025, and the next morning he was back on the trail filming Mamdani. He made it on loans and favors from friends, among them Kareem Rahma, his partner on the viral series Subway Takes. The show, in which Rahma asks riders for their hottest opinion using a MetroCard as a microphone, has become a phenomenon: more than two million followers on Instagram, over 700 million views on YouTube, an Emmy nomination and guests ranging from Cate Blanchett to Jennifer Lopez. Mamdani rode along too, and his take, that he should be New York's next Mayor, became one of the most viral clips of his campaign. At Gracie Mansion, Mamdani recalled the Italian hands that dug New York's subway tunnels and built its bridges. A century later, some of those hands hold a camera, and the story they tell about New York is now traveling back to Italy.