A Decree on Classrooms, and Sicily Counts Its Foreign Pupils

The Italian government has adopted a decree law capping the number of pupils with a poor command of Italian in each class and banning the burqa and niqab in schools, according to the BBC and Deutsche Welle. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the measures as "common-sense tools that do not divide but really help to integrate", the BBC reported. The Guardian wrote that critics accuse her of "running scared", courting far-right voters ahead of next year's general election, while the New York Times said the government's stated goal was better integration of non-Italian-speaking children.

The decree arrives in the same week the far right registered breakthroughs across Europe, a survey by The Local Italy noted, placing Rome's move in a widening continental pattern rather than an isolated one. France 24 and Politico Europe, meanwhile, reported a parallel argument in France, where Pope Leo XIV defended freedom of conscience at the Elysée without naming the populist forces eyeing power, and the front-runner Marine Le Pen has revived a proposed headscarf ban. The same question — what the state may ask of a child who arrives speaking another language — is being tested on both sides of the Alps at once.

Sicily meets that question before most of Italy does. The island is the Mediterranean frontier on which most migrant arrivals first set foot in Europe, and its schools are where those arrivals, or their children, become pupils. A cap on non-Italian-speaking pupils per class is therefore not an abstraction here: it is an arithmetic of classrooms in Palermo, Trapani and the interior, where the children of settled migrant families sit alongside newcomers. The foreign coverage does not quantify the island's share, and La Veduta does not invent one.