I grew up in an Italian American area in NY. Basically every single Italian American I knew growing up was a Columbus super fan, my family outright thinks that every negative thing said about him was a lie (fun fact, I read a passage from a translation of his journal and they said it was written by a liberal to make him look bad until I revealed Columbus wrote it himself), and attach tons of Italian-American ethnic pride to this dude who existed centuries before Italy was a country and never set foot in the USA (minus some Caribbean territories).