The ship served as a flagship during World War I, but saw very little action other than the Second Battle of Durazzo in 1918 during which she did not engage enemy forces.

Dante Alighieri was designed by Rear Admiral Engineer Edoardo Masdea, Chief Constructor of the Regia Marina, based on the ideas of General Vittorio Cuniberti who advocated a battleship with main guns of a single caliber and optimized for broadside fire.

[2] Dante Alighieri's main armament consisted of a dozen 46-caliber 305-millimeter (12 inch) guns,[3] in four triple-gun turrets positioned on the ship's centerline.

[4] Sources disagree regarding these guns' performance, but naval historian Giorgio Giorgerini claims that they fired 452-kilogram (996 lb) armor-piercing (AP) projectiles at the rate of one round per minute and that they had a muzzle velocity of 840 metres per second (2,800 ft/s) which gave a maximum range of 24,000 meters (26,000 yd).

For defense against torpedo boats, Dante Alighieri carried thirteen 50-caliber 76 mm (3 in) guns mounted on the turret tops.

[9] She was laid down at the naval shipyard in Castellammare di Stabia on 6 June 1909, launched on 20 August 1910, and completed on 15 January 1913.

[11] King Victor Emmanuel III entertained delegates to the Genoa Conference aboard Dante Alighieri in 1922.

[14] The Italian economy had been weakened by fighting in World War I, and by the late 1920s it could no longer afford to maintain a sizable fleet.

As a result, Admiral Giovanni Sechi decided to scrap Dante Alighieri and the salvaged battleship Leonardo da Vinci to reduce the naval budget.