Residents of some southern Brooklyn neighborhoods are known for decking out their houses with holiday lights.This has always seemed to me, as to others, to be one of those Italian things, like street fairs, that are part of the festive nature of much of Italian immigrant civic life in America. So it should not surprise us that with each new holiday season, the lights are not as bright in Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, and Bay Ridge, for the Italian households in those neighborhoods are fewer with each passing year.Yet every night of the year, the lights of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge twinkle, as though every night were Christmas.

That the bridge is named for an Italian seems only fitting, for the bridge has seemed to me always to be a festive thing. What is New York, when you fly in at night and see the bridges and the skyscrapers all lit up, but festive? The bridge is named for Giovanni da Verrazzano. Note the spelling: For reasons I’ve never understood, a “z” was removed when the bridge was named. Verrazzano was the 16th-century master mariner from Florence.

In those days of globalizing empires, such sea captains, capable of navigat ing ships through dauntingly uncharted realms, were in high demand, which is why Verrazzano, when he piloted the Dauphine through the Narrows, was working for King Francis I of France. (Similarly, the Englishman Henry Hudson worked for the Dutch East India Company.) Never mind that Verrazzano saw Bay Ridge and turned around, failing to explore beyond the Upper Bay. That the first European to see New York may have been an Italian was for Bay Ridge resident John La Corte as great a source of pride as that Cristoforo Colombo (working for Spain) may have been the first European in the Western Hemisphere.

La Corte worked tirelessly to elevate the image of Italian-Americans – a task nearly as daunting as navigating a ship through uncharted waters (“The Sopranos,” anyone?). Yet La Corte had notable successes, including helping to get Columbus Day declared a national holiday in 1973. And getting Robert Moses’s last bridge named after Verrazzano.

The Verrazano was also the last bridge of Othmar Hermann Ammann. Though many of the century’s best structural engineers were Italians, a Swiss designed the bridge. Ammann in fact gave New York most of its long, looping arcs of festive lights – he was the ultimate holiday house decorator. He designed the George Washington Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, the Bayonne, and the Goethals.

Whether one views it from an airplane or from Dyker Beach Park or from Shore Road, the Verrazano’s lighted lope across the Narrows makes one wonder, with a sense of awe, how such vast tonnages of steel can be made to look so lithe and graceful. The thought is inescapable: These bridges,like Manhattan’s skyscrapers, represent one of mankind’s greatest artistic triumphs.

That other Italian favored by Francis I – Leonardo – would likely have agreed.

fmorrone@nysun.com