King gives legal status to society promoting Italian language and culture
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| The Dante Alighieri Society was founded by a group of intellectuals in 1889 |
Umberto I had been king since 1878 after succeeding his father Victor Emmanuel I and he traditionally spent the summer at his country estate, Tenuta di San Rossore, situated on the Tuscan coast, within the Migliarino, San Rossore, Massaciuccoli Regional Park, having made it his primary administrative base during the month of July.
He recognised the Dante Alighieri Society as a charitable trust (ente morale) via Royal Decree No 347 to provide the organisation with official legal status to pursue its mission, which was to protect and spread the Italian language and culture globally.
The Dante Alighieri Society had been founded in 1889 by a group of intellectuals led by the poet Giosuè Carducci. It was during a period of mass Italian emigration and the Society aimed to maintain spiritual and cultural ties between Italian expatriates and their homeland. They also wanted to protect and spread the Italian language and culture across the world and nurture love and admiration for the Italian civilisation among foreigners.
By early in the 20th century there were Dante Alighieri Societies in Tunis, Zurich, Constantinople, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Belgrade and Barcelona, and libraries were established to allow Italians abroad to continue reading in Italian.
In the early 1920s there were 200 Dante Committees running societies in Italy and Italian colonies and another 93 abroad.
After World War II a new statute was enshrined stating ‘Societa Dante Alighieri, founded in 1889, aims to protect and spread Italian language and culture in the world, regardless of any particular politics, race, nationality, confession or ideology. It is the free association of those in the world who are united by the love for the Italian language, which is linked to cultural humanism and the universal language of music, morally inspired by the high model of Dantean character.’
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| The poet Giosuè Carducci was a driving force in the society's formation |
Dante’s Divine Comedy is considered to be the greatest literary work written in Italian and has been acclaimed all over the world.
In the 13th century most poetry was written in Latin, but Dante wrote in the Tuscan dialect, which made his work more accessible to ordinary people.
Writers who came later, such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, followed this trend. Therefore, Dante can be said to have played an instrumental role in establishing the national language of Italy and is considered the father of Italian literature.
His depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in the Divine Comedy later influenced the works of John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer and Lord Alfred Tennyson, among many others.
By 1315 Florence had been forced to grant an amnesty to those in exile in exchange for public penance and the payment of a heavy fine, but Dante refused, preferring to remain in exile.
He accepted an invitation from Prince Guido Novello da Polenta to go to Ravenna in 1318. He finished Paradiso - Heaven - and died there, possibly of malaria, in 1321 at about the age of 56.
Dante was buried at the Church of San Pier Maggiore, now known as the Basilica di San Francesco. A tomb was erected for him in Ravenna in 1483.
Florence made repeated requests for the return of Dante’s remains, but Ravenna has always refused. A tomb was built for him in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence but it has remained empty.
Today the Dante Alighieri Society have many groups in 74 different countries connecting about 142,000 people throughout the world who love the Italian lifestyle and culture.
.jpg "Dante's tomb remains in his city of exile, Ravenna") |
| Dante's tomb remains in his city of exile, Ravenna |
Dante’s house in Via Santa Margherita in Florence is now a museum, il Museo Casa di Dante, spread over three floors with exhibits illustrating the life and works of the great poet. Ravenna, where Dante lived in exile until his death in 1321, has a wealth of well-preserved late Roman and Byzantine architecture and eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites. One of the most important examples of early Christian Byzantine art and architecture is the Basilica di San Vitale, which is famous for its fine Byzantine mosaics. The city of Ravenna is mentioned by Dante in Canto V of his Inferno. Dante’s tomb is in Via Dante Alighieri next to the Basilica di San Francesco.
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| The San Rossore estate in Tuscany was used by King Umberto I as a summer retreat |
Tenuta di San Rossore is a vast, protected estate of forests, wetlands, and coastal dunes stretching between Pisa, the Arno and Serchio rivers, and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Once a Medici and later Savoy royal reserve, the estate evolved over centuries through reforestation, hydraulic engineering, and careful land management, eventually becoming part of the Migliarino, San Rossore and Massaciuccoli Natural Park. Its 4,800 hectares encompass ancient pinewoods, forests of oak, ash, and alder, and the cotoni - historic coastal dunes shaped by wind and colonised by sub‑Mediterranean vegetation. Seasonal marshes known as lame create biodiverse wet depressions that attract abundant wildlife. Visitors frequently encounter fallow deer, wild boar, and an exceptional array of migratory and wintering birdlife, especially around the Lame di Fuori wetlands. Umberto I continued the expansion and improvement of San Rossore begun under his father, Vittorio Emanuele II. Umberto I invested in its infrastructure, forestry, and animal husbandry. One of his most distinctive interventions was a renewed breeding programme for the estate’s historic dromedary herd, a population that had existed since Medici times.
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More reading:
Dante Alighieri, the famous son of Florence who remains in exile
The beautiful banker’s daughter who was Dante’s inspiration
Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature
Also on this day:
1610: The death of Renaissance genius Caravaggio
1853: The birth of painter Angelo Morbelli
1871: The birth of Futurist painter Giacomo Balla
1884: The birth of Cardinal Alberto di Jorio
1914: The birth of cyclist and war hero Gino Bartoli
1933: The birth of William Salice, inventor of the Kinder Egg