Italy: Infernal Row Flares Over Florence Council's Plans to Pardon Dante

A wine-growing aristocrat who is a direct descendant of the poet Dante Alighieri said yesterday he would boycott a ceremony at which he was to have received the city of Florence's highest honour on behalf of his ancestor.

Dante, the father of the Italian language, fled his native city in 1302 after being sentenced to death for crimes including fraud and extortion.

Florence council was to have healed the 700-year rift with the poet by presenting the city's golden florin to Count Pieralvise Serego Alighieri. The count, however, believes the Florentines are not sorry enough.

Last month, a meeting of the council's cultural committee, held to annul the expulsion order, prompted the kind of rancorous divisions that led to Dante's exile. Five councillors voted against the annulment and several others stayed away.

Count Pieralvise said it was "anything but a collective 'mea culpa' and symbolic ending of [Dante's] exile".

"I could have wept when I read the comments of some of the councillors," he said.

The proposed reconciliation, the initiative of two councilors from Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party, ran into fierce opposition from the radical left. Nicola Rotondaro, the leader of a communist group on the council, said Dante "did not need the council to rehabilitate him".

"If he had been sent to his death, would we perhaps have asked for his resurrection?" he said.

The count said it was "as if the people of Stratford-upon-Avon had quarrelled over an event in memory of Shakespeare".

Dante, who had been made a city elder, fled Florence after getting into a dispute with the papacy.

He spent much of his exile in Verona and died in Ravenna. It was outside Florence that he wrote much of his best work, including much of his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.