“Miss Italy Beauty Pageant Bans Biological Males From Competition,” states the headline at Breitbart. I was, of course, pleased to see this. I was also both pleased and amused by the comments from the Italian woman in charge of the beauty competition, as well as from the American men sounding off in the comments section.

Patrizia Mirigliani, who runs Italy’s pageant, no doubt sent Western progressives into hissy fits when she explained that “only women since birth” are welcome to compete to be Miss Italy. No dudes allowed, including hairy-legged (or shaved-legged) guys in high heels.

“Lately, beauty contests have been trying to make the news by also using strategies that I think are a bit absurd,” Mirigliani opined. “Miss Italia, on the other hand, will not jump on the glittery bandwagon of trans activism.”

Brava, Ms. Mirigliani. Brava!

The article is followed by over 1,400 reader comments cheering the Italians and, especially, cheering Italian women. “The women in Italy are gorgeous,” wrote one reader. Another added: “That is an absolute understatement. Italian women are some of the most beautiful on planet Earth.” Still another: “The women are breathtaking, as is the land and its architectural beauty.” Such comments went on and on, many of them very funny and many of which would elicit cries of “sexism,” “transphobia,” and other politically correct pabulum by our Western wimps.

But let’s stick to the topic of Italian beauty, one worthy of reflection.

Italian Women Are Exceptionally Beautiful

Reading those comments, I was reminded of what my friend Fabrizio told me the first time I visited Italy in June 2014: “American men, Russian men, all men — they’re all the same!” scoffed Fabrizio. “They want to know about two things: Italian women and Italian swear words! In that order.”

And no one can blame them. The beauty of Italian women is one of the very first things you notice the moment you arrive in Italy. Men notice. Women also notice. Surely even gay guys notice. Only a blind person couldn’t notice.

Of course, this is hardly a new phenomenon. The great Luigi Barzini, a close friend of this publication and of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., decades ago penned the classic work The Italians. It’s a wonderful read. Barzini had this to say about Italian women:

It must be said that the Italian girls and young women, for reasons nobody knows for sure, are now more disturbingly beautiful than they have ever been in men’s memory and perhaps in history, certainly more attractive and desirable than the models of the most famous statues and paintings in the past; Botticelli’s “Venus,” Titian’s “Sacred Love,” and Raphael’s “Fornarina” would not make anyone turn around in the streets. Italian girls are more attractive, and approachable, not only than in the past but also than in many other countries today.

Forgive Luigi, dear American feminists, as he waxed physical as well as philosophical about the perplexing phenomenon:

Our women … have somehow surprisingly acquired long and shapely legs; they have lovely and pert faces, overbearing breasts, thin waists, and harmonious behinds like double mandolins. But, more than this, they have simple, unembarrassed, friendly manners.

As for foreign men, Luigi observed that they were naturally immediately taken in by this: “Foreign men sometimes follow some especially provocative specimens in the streets like hungry dogs following butcher boys delivering meat.” (READ MORE: Barbie Questions the Success of Feminism)

As for a suitable explanation for this beauty, I imagine only the Creator Himself knows. (I’m open to theories from our own readers below.) Perhaps it’s thousands of years of refined Roman breeding plus the Mediterranean diet plus, well, I don’t know. But I would like to add to this important analysis a key element, and it relates to the significance of Italian tradition, which remains strong and thriving, and which I wrote about here recently whilst reporting on-site from Verona, Italy.

Italians Preserved Traditional Feminine and Masculine Roles

As secular as Italy has become, like much of Europe, with declining church attendance and astonishing drops in the birth rate — a dramatic about-face from thousands of years of large Italian families — the country remains very traditional. Men are men, and women are women. There are certainly exceptions to that, of course. By and large, however, femininity and masculinity still reign in Italy. That is literally true for the language, of course, but it also remains true among the people.

And thus, in the case of Italian women, they remain feminine, attractive, and yet — rejoice, feminists — strong and very much the backbone of the people. Everyone with an Italian mother or grandmother (including yours truly) can attest to that. Luigi Barzini observed that, in Italy, “[m]en run the country, but women run men. Italy is, in reality, a crypto-matriarchy.” Yes, wives respect their husbands and realize that the man “is the titular head of the household,” but they also realize that “by no means [is the husband] an absolute monarch.” Italian women “know that without them the whole structure would collapse like a house of cards within a few hours.” From mammas to countesses to princesses to nuns to abbesses to saints — like Catherine of Siena, co-patron of Italy, or Frances of Rome — to, of course, the Blessed Mother herself, women have always been held in the highest esteem in the country. That has long been the tradition.

Still, today, look at Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. She herself is symptomatic of much of what I’ve said here, with a number of uneasy contradictions for conservatives who admire her. She’s not married but has a child with her boyfriend whom she lives with, but she nonetheless fiercely defends Italian-Catholic tradition, marriage, life, children, and sexuality. She can’t stand wokeness. She was recently lectured by Canada’s unmanly embarrassment of a leader, Justin Trudeau, about LGBTQ+ “Pride.” She grimly stared at the sissified Trudeau with pathetic contempt as he tried to inform her in his typical weak-wristed way about why her country should be waving rainbow flags. (READ MORE: Toxic Femininity, Jonah Hill, and a Dying Culture)

Justin could use a heavy dose of some of that toxic masculinity that our liberals bemoan from their Manhattan offices and coffee shops. Those are offices and shops, incidentally, built by masculine men.

All of which brings me back to Miss Italy.

The Italians certainly have their problems, but thousands of years of civilization have implanted in them the basic, natural, biological, commonsense understanding that men are not women and women are not men. That is something that the New York Times and our infantile liberals plainly do not understand.

In Italy, men are not women. The Italians don’t want them to even try to be, especially in their Miss Italy pageant. Bravo to the Italians.