Message What we are | Italians

Dear Safargine, In France it seems that some Muslim students in a middle school rebelled against the teacher who showed them an old painting showing Actaeon discovering the goddess Diana naked with some of her classmates while bathing. Nudity was considered disrespectful. The scene belongs to mythological history and is narrated by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. It has crossed literary and pictorial history, our culture and our traditions. It has made us richer and made us who we are. Today someone says that our existence as we are is unhealthy and disrespectful. I am not afraid of Muslim children, who do what they receive from their parents, which is obviously more reliable than what they receive in Western schools, and are therefore actually successful in this regard, forcing them to think and do. I fear those Westerners who will tell us that these paintings should not be displayed, that Ovid was a pervert, and that we have made all the mistakes of the last twenty centuries of Western history. They will urge us to apologise. Woe to those who say that in that nakedness we do not see what Muslims see, because there will be those who want to convince us that we have now become blind. We too, like Actaeon, are undergoing a transformation: someone is urging it, inspiring it, forcing it. They want to turn us into dead people. Friendly regards.

Paolo Grecchi [email protected]