ABSTRACT
European models for managing the relationship between the state and religion are deeply different from one another. As cultural diversity increased in European societies, much attention has been placed on the gender dimension of intercultural clashes by politicians, legislators, courts, scholars and the media. Hence, the intensification of the struggles over the presence of religious symbols in public places testifies to a generalized European identity crisis and to an increasing difficulty in building 'accounts of individual and collective identity that do not fall into xenophobia, intolerance, paranoia, and aggression toward others. The Italian judge and prosecutor take a subjective stance and look at the full-face veil as a practice that testifies to the plurality of cultural forms, without automatically channelling the difference between 'veiling' and 'not veiling' into the dialectic of the clash of civilizations. The Constitutional Court, however, has declared that it is to be regarded as one of the fundamental principles of the Italian legal system.
