Poet, author and translator Alfred Palma has been honoured with the title Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia, in a decree signed by the Italian president Sergio Mattarella, on December 2, 2021. This honour was officially bestowed on Palma by the Italian Ambassador in Malta, Fabrizio Romano, during a short private ceremony held at the Italian Embassy in Floriana on March 15.

This honour is bestowed on authors, poets, writers and translators who, thanks to their literary work, promote Italian literature and diffuse it internationally. Palma won this honour mainly thanks to his monumental, complete and rhymed, Maltese translation of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, first published in 1991 and then 30 years later, in 2021.

For this translation, classified as being the closest and most faithful to the original among all the translations of the Commedia in other European languages, Palma was also honoured in Ravenna with the Lauro Dantesco (2008), in Malta with an MQR (2009) and with the title Cavaliere di Sicilia by the Società Esperantista (2020).