The dichotomy between sciences and humanities has an official date of birth in Italy—the Gentile’s reform of the educational system in 1923. Before that, it was unknown. Poets and writers could be interested in various sciences, and scientists were interested in philosophy and literature and pursued literary quality in their writings. This perception of the fundamental unitarity of human intellectual activities pertained to a long tradition, since Dante Alighieri’s poem Divina Commedia, which set the foundations of the Italian language. The Renaissance was a period of maximum unitarity of all the areas, and most scholars were expert in several areas of humanities and sciences. This chapter offers selected highlights on this unitarity. It analyses the presence of the science of those times in Divina Commedia, and also the presence of intuitions that became part of science many centuries later. It proceeds with a quick excursus through the subsequent centuries, and then devotes specific attention to a XIX century poem (‘on a fossil shell’, by Giacomo Zanella) depicting the geological evolution of the planet, as a telling example of the interest of a literature person in the scientific development of his time. The section before the last quickly summarises how the dichotomy was artificially introduced by the Gentile’s reform, the negative impacts on students’ and public perceptions, and the fact that the most brilliant writers and scientists ignored it in their works. The conclusions highlight the importance of the synergies between humanities and sciences for greater completeness of their approaches, including the ability to foster creativity.