Why I won’t accept the Laurels of Dante 

I have just refused to accept the local equivalent of an Oscar, which was to have been presented later this month in the Basilica di San Francesco next to the tomb of Dante Alighieri. I have done so because I believe I am not worthy. To accept would be unbecoming. It would dishonour both the award and me.

They want to crown me with the ‘Alloro di Dante’ – the Laurels of Dante – which each year they do to a tiny number of people they feel have made an important contribution to literature. The ceremony involves the placing of a wreath made of bay leaves, similar to the one in the Botticelli portrait of Dante, on the heads of those awarded the prize. The Franciscan monks in charge of the 10th-century basilica, where the crypt is underwater and contains fish, officiate.

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The organiser, my friend Paolo the poet, told me: ‘I want to do whatever I can to have your excellence as a journalist and author recognised. You are an exile in the same city as Dante was in exile.’ It is true that I am in a sense in exile here, but that is where the comparison quite obviously ends.

Dante was banished from Tuscany and wound up here in Romagna, where he wrote his magnum opus. Snotty Brits often call it ‘Poor Man’s Tuscany’ but I call it ‘Tuscany without the Brits’. Dante died in 1321, aged just 56, in Ravenna, once the headquarters of the Roman fleet, probably as a result of malaria. Bloody mosquitoes.

I know we all suffer from imposter syndrome and in life we must just bite the bullet and go for it, but the idea of giving me the Laurels of Dante is preposterous.