Why I refused to accept the Laurels of Dante 

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

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 dishonor 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.

The organizer, my friend Paolo the poet, told me: “I want to do whatever I can to have your excellence as a journalist and author recognized. 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. It’s not just, as a Palermo taxi driver shouted at me not so long ago when I only had a card, not cash, to pay the fare: “You are a morto di fame!” The phrase is a major insult and means “dead from hunger,” i.e. “deadbeat.” I cannot deny that he had a point.

Last year, the only person crowned with the Laurels was the 2023 Nobel prize winner for literature no less: Jon Fosse. I have not got the faintest idea who he is. But when I checked him out online I discovered that, despite his Anglo-sounding name, he is Norwegian and is what they call a “mystical realist” whose masterpiece is an 835-page novel about an alcoholic painter who converts to Catholicism. It does not contain a single full stop. Alcohol and Catholicism interest me a lot but so do full stops. I like full stops.

How can I follow in the footsteps of such a colossus? I cannot. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915): “No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be/ Am an attendant lord one that will do/ To swell a progress start a scene or two.”

Yes, at school in Canterbury, I was head of house and got first colors for cricket and replaced – would you believe it? – David Gower opening the batting for the school. On a good day, I was a stylish left-hander just like him. And I got a place at Cambridge where I was a senior exhibitioner and there was punting on the Cam up to Grantchester for tea and even the odd mad drive by car to Paris for breakfast.

But then what? I ended up in a squat in the derelict Docklands down by the Thames, which prompted the first article I ever wrote: “What it’s like to have the shit kicked out of you in Rotherhithe.” And so on.

The only achievement I am proud of has nothing to do with writing. It is that I fell in love with a Romagnola – Carla – and we have six children. Three boys and three girls.

When our first child, Caterina, was born I wrote an article about her birth in the Italian newspaper I worked for in which I said: “Nothing I have ever done in my life comes close to the creation of you.” As I write I can hear Magdalena, 17, our middle daughter, who goes to music school, playing her viola in the kitchen. My three sons are about to watch their team Juventus play on a laptop but two – Giovanni Maria, 13, and Giuseppe, nine – must first go upstairs to wake up Rita, 16, who is often asleep, with the cymbals from Giovanni’s drum kit and even an actual drum itself, it seems, by the sound of things. Caterina, 21, meanwhile, has just left to go back to Milan, where she got a scholarship to study fashion design at the top place to be. Francesco Winston, 19, is shouting as usual.

I feel guilty that I have brought them all into this star-crossed world and pray that none gets struck down by the awful existential depression that crept up on me like a shadow in 1979, aged 20, as I watched a sunset on the Greek island of Paros. It left me in a place below boredom and beyond despair which made life from then on like climbing a mountain without oxygen. People like my father, a self-made dentist, would say: “Just pull yourself together.” But you can’t, can you?

By chance, thank God, I found that love is more powerful than depression. It cured me, more or less. Books, let alone doctors’ pills, could never have come close.

I think Dante, if he cared, would agree that I am right to refuse the award in his name. For as he wrote in Canto XI of Purgatory, part II of The Divine Comedy: “A breath of wind – no more – is earthly fame/ And now this way it blows and that way now,/ And as it changes quarter, changes name.”