Are Quotation Marks Necessary Here?

I'm pretty sure you can use either italics or quotation marks. This is not a misuse of quotation marks as emphasis; it's more like a direct quote. Use the present tense: Italian still exists and this is the still the translation (that would be true for Latin, as well, which is a so-called "dead language"). The comma after school is unnecessary, as you correctly surmised.

Frankly, the sentence is a bit of a run-on. It could be rewritten as follows:

It has to be in quotations, because the implications have been made already. It's not "high view" alone, it's "high view" appealed to.

So if I said, "we had come across a jungle, which people generally call the "rain forest"; it doesn't get any rain, so we walked through without getting wet."

From, "we walked into the rain forest." This sentence has no implications that are controversial and appealed to. Emphasis is a means of drawing attention to an implication.