Dante Alighieri stands in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C.  Commissioned by Carlo Barsotti as a gift on behalf of “the Italians in the United States,” Italian artist Ettore Ximenes sculpted the monument in 1921, the 600th anniversary of the poet’s death.

The statue was included in the Smithsonian’s Save Outdoor Sculpture D.C. survey in 1994, and was featured in a 2014 Washington Post editorial called “Monument Madness,” where it lost to a statue of Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog in the Elite 8.

Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’07)