The date variable is {$date}. The output depends on your general settings. To change it you can use this format: {$date|date_format:'%d.%m.%Y'} where %d represents days, %m represents months and %Y represents year.
You can read more about the format at Smart webpage:
If you wanted to print a different date than today, you can use it like this:
{"$date + 7 days"|date_format:'%d.%m.%Y'}
This will output next weeks date, the result format is e.g. 30.08.2013