Node id of home page If I choose a node to be the home page, how can I get its node id in the page template?

Can menu_get_item() be used for this?
@Oswald: thanks for pointing in the right direction. This snippet does exactly what I need:

$front_url = variable_get('site_frontpage', 'node');
$front_url = trim($front_url, '/');
$front = explode('/', $front_url);
if( $front[0]=='node' &amp;&amp; ctype_digit($front[1]) ) {
  $front_nid = $front[1];
}
echo $front_nid;