Coins and Italian Literature

In Italian literature, many references to concrete coins can often be found, especially in the realistic code. This poster chooses a diachronic approach for these “literary coins”, since XIII century Italian literature, with augustali and massamotini quoted by Cielo d’Alcamo (1240) and the santalene by Guido Cavalcanti (1300). Dante Alighieri and his "Commedia" allow to speak about an allegoric and moral interpretation of coins, as a sacral symbol of human community or as a metaphor of human avidness; from "Commedia", some important cases of forgery and imitation are extracted, too. A similar interpretation of coins is possible in a Boccaccio’s novella from Decameron (VI, 3), in which fiorino and popolino, with a sort of paradox, are reciprocally forged. After a chronological jump, the poster shows the ideological roots of "Vergilia anceps" by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1904), in which some Greek coins represent a metaphor of the naval and agricultural rebirth of Italy, with reference to an ichnography accepted by Vittorio Emanuele's and Republican coins.