Italian Groups Seek Return of Columbus Statue in Ohio Capital

Multiple Italian American organizations said in a lawsuit Tuesday that officials in Columbus, Ohio are legally required to restore the statue of its namesake in front of City Hall.

Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) ordered the capital city’s Christopher Columbus statue be placed in storage in 2020, following nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and evolving discourse about Columbus’ actions. That decision violated federal, state, and local laws and discriminated against Italian Americans, according to the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

The 22-foot, three-and-a-half-ton statue was a gift from the city of Genoa, Italy as part of a 1955 sister-cities agreement and “is perhaps the most important piece of public artwork in all of Central Ohio, located prominently in an eligible historic district, depicting the literal namesake of the city itself,” the lawsuit said, which called the removal “performative virtue signaling.”

The statue’s absence “has caused extreme, ongoing distress,” among the central Ohio Italian American community, the suit said.

Multiple federal agencies violated the National Historic Preservation Act by giving the city money while skirting its obligations under the law, according to the lawsuit.

“This includes, most notably, failure to ‘foster conditions[,]’ ‘provide leadership[,]’ or ‘contribute to the preservation of’ the Statue,” the suit said. “This omission is glaring—and damning.”

The statue must be outside City Hall to maintain “amicable foreign relations” between the capital city and Genoa and that each federal agency had the power to force the city to restore the statue to where it once stood, the lawsuit said.

The Columbus Piave Club, which holds an ownership interest in the statue and is the suit’s lead plaintiff, was also deprived of due process before the removal.

The plaintiffs want a federal judge to force city officials to return “all wrongfully disbursed monies” and for the statue to be returned.

The plaintiffs are represented by Bochetto & Lentz and Dougherty, Hanneman & Piccin LLC.

The case is Columbus Piave Club v. Columbus, S.D. Ohio, No. 2:26-cv-00419, complaint filed 4/7/26.