Ricerc@Sapienza

The Italian system of rules on religious symbols in the public sphere offers a sufficiently broad guarantee to the rights of freedom of religion and conscience, whose exercise appears to be guaranteed and circumscribed only within the limits of what is strictly necessary, according to reasonableness and proportionality criteria. Italian regulation of religious symbols is based on the perception of symbols as factors homogeneous to the public space, and presents a substantial coherence which derives from its necessary tendency and conformity to the model of pluralism and open dialogue found in the Italian Constitution. This model requires the tangible margins of freedom recognized in Italy to the display of religious symbols on the bodies of the faithful in public spaces. Similarly, for the Italian constitutional regime it is possible to have a concept of secularism that admits identity and other beliefs, consistent with the rules on the display of religious symbols in public institutional space. The Italian model, however, is mainly the result of the hermeneutical development of case law, so that on the one hand the protection of the values recognized by the discipline on religious symbols in public spaces concretely depends on the meaning from time to time attributed by the judges to the specific symbols and, on the other hand, the changing and uncertain nature of the jurisprudential law has increased the decision-making power on these matters of the public authorities. Therefore, in Italy the acceptance of requests to display or not religious symbols, which are increasingly frequent because of the increase of religious, ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the country, depends exclusively on the discretionary appreciation of the judiciary or the executive power with a risk of unjustifiable differences in the protection of fundamental rights.