TEHRAN – The statue of Hakim Abolghasem Ferdowsi, the famous Iranian poet in Italy, has been cleaned and restored on the occasion of May 15, registered in the national calendar of Iran as his day.
Ferdowsi was born in 329 AH in the village of Pazh in the historical city of Toos. He is known as the most important and well-known Iranian and Persian orator.
His statue on a square of the same name in Rome has been restored by the Municipality of Rome in cooperation with the Iranian Embassy in Italy.
Made of white marble, the 1.85 meter statue is the work of Abolhassan Sadighi, who was installed it at the site in 1958.
A cultural and literary webinar in honor of the poet was also held at the initiative of the Cultural Counselor of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Italy.
Muhammad Taqi Amini, Iran’s cultural attaché in Italy, Antonello Secchi, Italian writer Giacomo Longi, and Michele Marley, Persian language and literature experts, spoke at the “An Era with Ferdowsi” webinar.
Explaining the activities of the Iranian Cultural Counselor in Italy to introduce Ferdowsi, Amini said that Ferdowsi has been known in Italy for a long time and the oldest manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, written in 614 AH, is kept in the National Library of Florence.
In the webinar, the Italian lecturers also emphasized that Ferdowsi had a high position in reviving the Persian language with Shahnameh.
The Shahnameh or Shahnama is a long epic poem written by Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 “distichs” or couplets, the Shahnameh is one of the world’s longest epic poems.