Profile of Dante Alighieri, a detail inspired by a painting by Sandro Botticelli (private collection). Around, the inscription “REPUBBLICA ITALIANA” with a star at its end.

Depicts a stylised reproduction of Dante’s Inferno with the nine circles described in the Divine Comedy showing the devil’s wings, fire and ice in colour. Within the composition, on the left, detail from Luca Signorelli’s frescoes in the Cathedral of Orvieto. Around, the inscription “and thence we came forth to see again the stars”, the closing verse of the cantica named Inferno, encircled by stars; at the centre, the value and the years of Dante’s death and the coin’s issue; the mintmark "R" on the left, the name of the designer “MOMONI” on the right.

Inferno (Italian for "Hell") is the first part of Italian writer Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. The Inferno describes Dante's journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the "realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen".

Painted by Luca Signorelli from 1499 to 1503 in the San Brizio Chapel in the Cathedral in Orvieto, Italy, the fresco represents one part of the End of Days narrative, when Christ returns to judge mankind—and to separate those who will go to heaven (the blessed) from those who will go to hell (the damned).