750th Birthday of Dante Alighieri

Dante holding an open book in his left hand, with the Mount of Purgatory ("Purgatorio") from the Divine Comedy in the background, as depicted by the painter Domenico di Michelino (1417–1491) in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Between the figures, the Italian Republic monogram "RI"; to the right, the Rome Mint mark "R"; below, the initials of Silvia Petrassi and the dates "1265" and "2015" (Dante's birth year and the coin's issue year); arcing above the image, the inscription "DANTE ALIGHIERI".

Dante Alighieri was born around 1265 in Florence and is regarded as the founder of the Italian literary language. His decision to write the Divine Comedy not in Latin but in Tuscan vernacular was no mere stylistic choice: he elevated a spoken language into a language of art, laying the foundation on which standard Italian would later develop. The three-part masterwork — Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso — describes a journey through the afterlife, placing Dante's contemporaries alongside figures of antiquity within a theological-philosophical system heavily shaped by Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic tradition. Dante died in 1321 in exile in Ravenna; he never returned to Florence, which had banished him in 1302.

Dante's fame extends far beyond literary history. During the 19th-century Risorgimento, he was elevated to a national icon of Italy — "il Sommo Poeta", the poet of unity. The famous 1465 depiction by the painter Domenico di Michelino, now in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, shows Dante holding the open manuscript of the Divine Comedy against the backdrop of Florence, the Mount of Purgatory and Hell — an image that has shaped the perception of Dante's work for centuries. 2015 marked the 750th anniversary of his birth; Italy commemorated the jubilee with its own 2-euro coin, drawing on Michelino's fresco.