On Monday, I will march in the annual Columbus Day Parade up Fifth Avenue. I will join thousands of revelers in celebrating their Italian heritage, their culture and the contributions Italian-Americans have made to this city and this nation.

And I will join their calls to keep the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle right where it is.

This statue should not be removed.

This summer, I joined in the national outcry to excise from the public square statues and monuments that celebrated the leadership of the Confederacy. This included two statues of Confederate generals in my borough — Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson — that made their home in the historic Hall of Fame for Great Americans on the campus of Bronx Community College.

Statues are about more than just the person they depict. They are symbolic. The intent behind the installation of such monuments cannot be ignored.

The Confederacy was an inherently evil entity that split our country in two in a futile effort to maintain slavery as an institution.

Many of the statues constructed to honor the so-called “heroes” of the Confederate states were erected during the periods of post-Reconstruction in the South and the Civil Rights movement, and served as not-so-thinly veiled threats to the African-American populations in the communities where they were installed.

Jim Crow-era monuments to white supremacy and the leadership of seditious insurrection should not be tolerated, except for where they belong: in cemeteries.

However, the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle was not built to herald the explorer’s subjugation of native people. If it had been, I would be the first to demand that it be torn down.

No, the Columbus Circle statue was erected in 1892 following a massive fundraising campaign by the nation’s Italian-American community in recognition of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the Americas.

Hard-working men, women and families of Italian descent, along with businesses and various institutions with Italian or Italian-American ties, pooled their money to pay for the statue as a way to give something of value back to the city that had given so much to them. They were acting in the spirit of community and with a love of this nation and the dream it represents.

Across the city, there are statues and monuments to great men and great women who have made a significant impact on our world. Yet they cannot be judged fairly using only the standards of our time.

Up the East Side of Manhattan, motorists use a highway named for President Franklin Delano Roose­velt, a man who supervised the racist internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

In The Bronx, one of our most famous monuments is of Henry Hudson, a man who activists have said was an imperialist who destroyed indigenous communities.

But this does not change the fact that President Roosevelt led our nation admirably through World War II, or that Hudson’s groundbreaking navigation set forward the path that founded our entire region.

These were complicated figures, and they should be examined and studied as such.

This is also the case with Columbus, whose merits as an explorer can and should be balanced against his shameful, often vicious, treatment of the people he came into contact with when he arrived in the New World.

But the statue in Columbus Circle represents much more than the explorer. It represents the spirit of the Italian-Americans that have done so much to shape this city and this nation — from giants like Fiorello La Guardia and Joe DiMaggio and Mother Cabrini, to the laborers who built so much of this great city.

It belongs where it is. Let it stay there.

Ruben Diaz Jr. is borough president of The Bronx.