Champion £28,000 truffle is laid to rest in Tuscany with full honours

The champion white truffle that changed hands last month for £28,000 and then went bad in a Knightsbridge restaurant was yesterday returned to its native sod. Attended by Tuscan guardsmen in medieval costume and wrapped in a blue cloth, it was solemnly interred to the throbbing of a drum.

Dust to dust, truffles to truffles ... rarely can a truffle have been so honoured, and not subjected even once to the indignity of being eaten.

The whopping subterranean fungus weighing nearly 2lbs was unearthed in the summer in the hills behind the pretty Tuscan village of San Miniato. Put up for auction (the proceeds went to charity) it was snapped up by a secret consortium believed to include Gwyneth Paltrow and Roman Abramovich. They dispatched the truffle, about the size of a human brain, for safe keeping to Zafferano, a top-notch Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge. Enzo Cassini, the restaurant's manager, must have seemed a safe pair of hands. When it wasn't being gawped at, the truffle resided in a safe inside the restaurant's refrigerator, under lock and key. But it went off.

Mr Needham made the best amends he could, burying the truffle in his garden. But then Giselle Oberti, the organiser of the auction, asked for her truffle back. Such a noble specimen, she felt, should be accorded full honours. In exchange for a collection of truffles, Mr Cassini flew the monster back to Tuscany, where yesterday it was interred in the forested grounds of the Castello di Cafaggiolo, a castle once owned by the Medici. Ms Oberti said she hopes it will generate more such prodigies.