Metro

Ancestral Italian hometown rolls out red carpet for de Blasio

Thousands of cheering locals greeted Mayor de Blasio as a hometown hero in a “Welcome Home Bill” celebration Wednesday in the small Italian town of Sant’Agata de’ Goti that brought gushes of emotion from the mayor.

De Blasio’s grandfather, Giovanni de Blasio, left the town near Naples for the United States in the early 1900s — but the lengthy timespan didn’t lessen the shower of acclaim heaped on the mayor.

“There were just, throughout the day, moments that brought back my grandfather, brought back my mother,” said de Blasio, whose mother passed away in 2007.

“I felt many times throughout the day that they were still with us — and that was incredibly moving.”

In true de Blasio fashion — and even without a busy work schedule — he arrived an hour late to the festivities during which he was made an honorary citizen of the town.

Hizzoner gave speeches in Italian — with his Italian accent notably better than his Spanish one — and English, and he spoke of his grandfather learning “lessons of fairness and justice here in the streets of Sant’Agata.”

The admiring locals baked pizza in the shape of a heart, with the mayor’s name fashioned out of dough on top — and served a cappuccino scrawled with “Welcome home Bill” in cocoa.

They set up a giant red stage in the middle of the town’s piazza, hung both Italian and US flags off lamp posts, and draped large photos of the whole de Blasio family from nearby buildings.

The pomp concluded with a marching band playing both the US and Italian national anthems.

“The love and support we’ve received here is absolutely overwhelming, it’s amazing,” de Blasio said afterward — “more than we ever could have imagined.”

Before the public event kicked off, de Blasio and his family toured the town and its cemetery and were given a map of his family tree by local officials.

Earlier on Wednesday, in Naples, de Blasio very pointedly ate a slice of pizza with cutlery — just months after sparking a scandal for doing the same thing at a Staten Island pizzeria.

At the time, he declared: “In my ancestral homeland, it is more typical to eat with a fork and knife.”

The mayor dined privately with his Naples counterpart, Luigi De Magistris, on Wednesday.

On Thursday, the family is visiting Grassano, the hometown of de Blasio’s maternal grandmother.

Later in the week, the 8-day de Blasio tour of Italy will hit Venice before the family returns to New York on Sunday.