Giorgia Meloni's electrifying speech at the World Congress of Families, ...

2019 speech in Verona, Italy at the World Congress of Families...

Defending the "unenlightened" Middle Ages around 6:30

"But they think everything we propose is crazy.  They think it's unenlightened, that we want to take away rights... the middle ages ... You know the middle ages was also the time of the cathedrals and the abbeys, the founding of the comuni, the universities, the parliament, the epoch of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Saint Francis, Saint Benedict ... People who don't know where Matera is, let's not expect them to have read history books."

Meloni sounded like Ungar debating Derwent in Melville's Clarel.

 

In Ungar's longer view of history and art, the great cathedrals of medieval Europe proclaim

A magnanimity which our time
Would envy, were it great enough
To comprehend.  -- Clarel Part 4 Canto 10 A Monument

Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (New York, 1876). Edited by Walter E. Bezanson for Hendricks House, Inc. (New York, 1960).