Happy Columbus Day!

photo: NY Newsday

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg marches in the Columbus Day Parade on Fifth Avenue.

NEW YORK -- Nearly a half century after he marched in New York's Columbus Day parade as a high school student, U.S. Supreme Court Justice returned to his hometown Monday to lead marchers up Antonin Scalia Fifth Avenue as the procession's grand marshal.

Cheering spectators waving Italian flags and carrying banners stood six or seven deep on some sections of the route through midtown Manhattan to celebrate the first Italian to visit the New World.

Scalia, the first Italian-American to serve on the Supreme Court, marched in a brown suit and white sash and waved to the crowd while his wife, Maureen, followed in a gold Lamborghini.

Asked how the experience compared to his previous marches in the 1950s as a student at Xavier High School, in Manhattan, Scalia joked, "I'm older now."

"It's a terrific day. It's been a nice walk," he said.

Thousands of spectators turned out in overcast but pleasantly mild weather to see police officers, firefighters, the Italian National Police Band and a number of high school bands troop through the city.

Along one section of the parade route, mock Italian peddlers dressed in old fashioned clothing manned pushcarts laden with shoes and craftwork in an apparent nod to the working class Italian labor that helped build modern New York.

Spectator Rose Trionfo, of East Meadow, on Long Island, came to watch her son, Michael, march with a group of students who had received scholarships from the Columbus Citizens Foundation, the group that sponsors the parade.

"I'm extremely proud of my heritage. My parents came here and realized the American dream," said Trionfo, whose mother and father came to the U.S. from Sicily.

There was little or no noticeable response from the crowd to the presence of Mirko Tremaglia, a right-wing Italian cabinet minister who some critics had said was an inappropriate choice for a parade guest.

Tremaglia, who rode in an open car and waved a large Italian flag for the crowd, was a soldier for Benito Mussolini as a young man and later joined the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist party formed after World War II by the executed dictator's followers.

Tremaglia, 79, is now Italy's minister of affairs related to Italians living abroad. He was criticized in Europe last year for using a slur to describe homosexuals while complaining that gays had too much political influence in the European Union.

He shrugged off his critics Monday.

"I will respond to the criticism through the Italians in America, who now can vote to reject the criticism of the left wingers," he said in Italian, referring to his work on the laws that allow Italian citizens living overseas to vote in elections back home.

George De Stefano, a writer who was among a group circulating criticism of Tremaglia's presence on the Internet, called him an "unapologetic fascist."

"My father was a World War II veteran. He was a son of immigrants who fought in southern Italy, and for the organizers of the Columbus Day parade to invite someone from the other side for this kind of honor ... if anything could be called un-American, it's this."

Source: Associated Press