«We are crazy. That someone asks to put hell, purgatory and heaven out of the classroom because it offends someone else and that there are professors who have the time to keep up with them is madness.” The deputy prime minister and leader of the League Matteo Salvini, today in Cortona in the Arezzo area to present his latest book “Controvento”, thus comments on the case arising from the exemption from the study of the Divine Comedy decided for two Muslim students in a middle school in the province of Treviso. «One arrives in Italy, he is welcome, we throw open the doors, we offer school, health, home, work, future, but we cannot be the ones to change – continued Salvini – No to the crucifix, to Christmas, to the Divine Comedy, to fairy tales , school closures for Ramadan. No, we are in Italy. If someone doesn’t like Dante, if someone doesn’t like Jesus Children, he can also return to his country, peacefully.”
The case concerns a middle school in Treviso, where the Muslim parents of two eighth-grade students asked that their children be exempted from studying Dante’s Divine Comedy and be able to replace it with Boccaccio. A request that the teacher and the principal ultimately accepted. It would have been the same teacher, who in the past had had to deal with some complaints on the same topic, who asked in advance the families of the children who do not follow the religion class to let her know if they had anything against the study of Dante. And at that point the two Muslim families expressed their opposition to the study of a text considered disrespectful of the Islamic religion. An absurd case that risks becoming a precedent. The Minister of Education Giuseppe Valditara yesterday announced that an inspection has been «arranged to verify the facts. The exclusion from the school curriculum of one of the pillars of our literature, for religious or cultural reasons we have not yet fully understood, is completely unacceptable.”
