this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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in Italian schools, when teaching the history of the discovery of America, Christopher Columbus is described as a hero...
I learned in the US that he was a mixed bag, but no specifics, until I took a history class in Spanish in college. It could be the language difference or the fact that it wasn’t a Catholic school (edit: or honestly, it could have been that instructors are less likely to get angry calls about nightmares in college), but that’s the first place that we got accurate information about him.
We read his journals, which should be possible with a B2 Spanish (but I suspect Italian would also help, because Columbus was pretty confused about Spanish/italian/portuguese and the journals have a lot of idiosyncratic vocabulary), and they’re stomach turning. He was a fucking monster.
The Roman Catholic Church of the time would not have approved of Columbus enslaving Christians so it is weird your RC schools praised him.
They didn’t praise him exactly, they said he was a bad person who did great things. They just didn’t go into detail about the horrific things he also did.
In the Northeast US we definitely learned about him as a hero, but people (at least my age in my area) seemed too pretty quickly, accept that he wasn't as good as we had originally learned.
French schools too. In 1992 Columbus was a huge deal, we spent a lot of time staging a play about his first voyage, and he was of course depicted as a righteous hero. I was just a lowly soldier, in hindsight I'm glad they didn't make us reenact the actual events, shit would've scarred me for life...