ABSTRACT
Today's Italy constitutes no exception in a continent which is becoming increasingly plural in terms of religious affiliation, as a consequence of both waves of immigration and globalization of faiths. Although these phenomena have entailed the presence of several new religions in a continent previously hegemonized by Christian denominations, many of the recent controversies and public debates have focused on Islam, both because it represents the main non-Christian minority in Europe. In the authors analysis of the Italian debate on Muslim places of worship, they have detected four different frames adopted by the main actors of the public debate. Such debates have focused on the presence of Muslim places of worship as such, but particularly on the creation of visible mosques built according to traditional Middle-Eastern architectural models, and the spatial and non-spatial signs of their presence, such as the minarets and the adhan.
