Meloni announces ban on burqa, niqab in Italian schools and cap on foreign students

In Rome this week, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced proposals to ban face-covering Islamic veils in Italian schools and to limit the number of foreign students per classroom — measures she frames as tools of integration, though critics and legal scholars see in them the older, unresolved tension between a nation's desire for cultural cohesion and the individual's claim to religious identity. Italy joins a broader European conversation that has never quite found its resolution, where the schoolroom becomes the arena in which civilizational questions are quietly, and not so quietly, conte