Inferno · Canto XXIX ·
Inferno XXIX — Geri Del Bello Pointing
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 29 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XXIX
Before reading
This is a transitional canto. It closes the bolgia of the sowers of discord with a small painful piece of Dante family business, and it opens the bolgia of the falsifiers with a leprous landscape and a Sienese joke. The famous lines of canto XXVIII are behind us; the slow grim middle-distance of the tenth bolgia begins here.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim and Virgil are still on the ridge above the bolgia of the sowers of discord. The walk has been long; the wounded faces have run together; the canto opens with the pilgrim's eyes inebriated by the many people and the divers wounds. Virgil has to draw him away. As they cross the next ridge, Dante is still looking back into the bolgia behind them, searching for a specific face — a relative of his own. The first half of this canto is the unfinished business of the previous; the second half belongs to a new bolgia, the tenth and last of Malebolge, the bolgia of the falsifiers.
What it helps to know
The shade Dante is searching for in the previous bolgia is Geri del Bello, a first cousin of the poet's father. Geri was killed in a Florentine vendetta in the 1280s, and his death — by the testimony of this canto — had still not been avenged by any of his kinsmen, including Dante himself, at the time the poem was being written. Among the sowers of discord because he had fomented quarrels within his own family, Geri sees the pilgrim, points at him in anger, and walks on. Dante never speaks to him. The detail is unusual in the Inferno: the pilgrim's eye searches for a soul he wishes to acknowledge, and the soul refuses contact. The unfinished blood-feud is a small piece of guilty conscience the poet sets down in his own poem.
The new bolgia is the bolgia of the falsificatori — the falsifiers of metals (alchemists in this canto), of persons (impersonators in canto XXX), of money (counterfeiters in canto XXX), and of words (perjurers in canto XXX). The four subtypes are stacked together because they all adulterate what was given them whole. The punishment is disease — every kind of disease, layered and piled on the bolgia floor like a hospital ward without staff. The opening simile compares the bolgia to a vast charity hospital in summer in Valdichiana, Maremma, and Sardinia — three Italian regions notorious in the Middle Ages for endemic malaria.
The first souls the pilgrim meets in this bolgia are two alchemists from Siena: Griffolino of Arezzo (burnt at the stake in Siena for having promised to teach a local nobleman to fly) and Capocchio (a Florentine known to Dante personally — I was of Nature an excellent ape, as he names himself a few lines past the canto's end). Their condition is leprous: they sit propped back to back like two pans of a balance, raking themselves with their nails for the great itch that has no relief, and as the nails come away the scales of skin come away with them. The image is one of the Inferno's most clinically realised.
The Sienese joke embedded in the canto is one of Dante's most acid. The pilgrim asks Virgil, mock-rhetorically, whether any people was ever as vain as the Sienese; the answer comes back as a riff naming the great spendthrifts of a particular Sienese aristocratic group called the Brigata Spendereccia — the Spendthrift Brigade, a club of young noblemen famous for inventing ways to ruin themselves financially. Dante is using the bolgia of the alchemists to settle a Tuscan rivalry; the joke is at the expense of Siena's pretensions and, by extension, of the pretensions of every Italian city that thought itself cleverer than its neighbours.
What to read for
Notice the simile of the currycomb. The alchemists rake themselves the way a stable-boy curries a horse, for the great rage / Of itching which no other succor had. The image is domestic, unliterary, and chosen for its precision. Dante is bringing into his vocabulary of damnation the gestures of the medieval barnyard.
Notice the silence between the pilgrim and Geri. The poet who has spoken to so many of his city's dead does not speak to his own cousin. Pay attention to the moral position the canto leaves Dante in by saying so.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto is the structural hinge between the bolgia of the sowers of discord and the bolgia of the falsifiers. Its first half closes the previous canto with a piece of unfinished business so personal that Dante is willing to slow the descent for it; its second half opens the last bolgia of Malebolge with a hospital-ward simile drawn from the malarial summers of central Italy and an acid joke at the expense of Siena. The canto is brief, the famous lines are few, and the work it does is mostly preparatory — but two of its small moments matter more than their length suggests. The first is the silence that falls between Dante and his own cousin. The second is the way the canto invents a tonal register — sick, clinical, peeling, jocular — that the Inferno has not yet used and that will dominate the descent's last bolgia.
The unspoken cousin
The shade Dante stays back to look at is Geri del Bello, a first cousin of his father, killed in a Florentine vendetta and — by this canto's testimony — still unavenged at the time of writing. The bolgia he is in is the bolgia of the sowers of discord: Geri's sin was that he had set members of his own family against each other. The exchange the canto records is not a conversation. Geri sees the pilgrim, points at him in anger, and walks on:
Be no longer broken Thy thought from this time forward upon him; Attend elsewhere, and there let him remain; For him I saw below the little bridge, Pointing at thee, and threatening with his finger Fiercely, and heard him called Geri del Bello. So wholly at that time wast thou impeded By him who formerly held Altaforte, Thou didst not look that way; so he departed. (Inf. XXIX.22–30)
What follows is one of the most morally exposed passages the pilgrim ever speaks. He explains to Virgil that Geri's violent death, not yet avenged for him… By any who is sharer in the shame, is the cause of the anger he saw. The medieval honour code took the duty of avenging a murdered kinsman as binding; Dante, by his own account in this tercet, has failed in that duty. The poem records the failure without resolving it. The pilgrim does not promise the vengeance; the poet does not edit the silence out. The bolgia of the sowers of discord, which has just spent a canto cursing those who divided families, ends on the family the poet himself has failed to defend. The position is uncomfortable and the Commedia lets it be so.
The hospital simile
The opening of the new bolgia is one of the canto's set-pieces:
What pain would be, if from the hospitals Of Valdichiana, 'twixt July and September, And of Maremma and Sardinia All the diseases in one moat were gathered, Such was it here, and such a stench came from it As from putrescent limbs is wont to issue. (Inf. XXIX.46–51)
The geography is precise. Valdichiana, Maremma, and Sardinia were the three regions of Italy most notorious in the Middle Ages for endemic summer malaria — territories whose hospitals filled, year after year, with thousands of the unsalvageably ill. Dante is using the literal Italian summer ward as the metaphor for the bolgia, and the choice of register matters. The earlier bolge had borrowed images from war, from the bestiary, from the underworld of pagan epic. This one borrows from the medical infrastructure of contemporary Italy. The falsifier's punishment is not heroic, not theatrical, not mythological — it is the closest thing a medieval European had seen to a permanent hospital, with no convalescence and no discharge.
The alchemists and the currycomb
The first two named falsifiers are alchemists from Siena and Arezzo, propped back to back on the bolgia floor, raking their own leprous skin in a vain effort against the unrelievable itch:
I saw two sitting leaned against each other, As leans in heating platter against platter, From head to foot bespotted o'er with scabs; And never saw I plied a currycomb By stable-boy for whom his master waits, Or him who keeps awake unwillingly, As every one was plying fast the bite Of nails upon himself, for the great rage Of itching which no other succor had. And the nails downward with them dragged the scab, (Inf. XXIX.73–82)
The simile of the currycomb is the canto's signature. The unliterary specificity — the stable-boy, the master who waits — drops the diction of the Inferno into the medieval farmyard at exactly the moment the punishment most needs to be felt as physical. The work of the nails is rhythmic and useless, and the simile measures it against a domestic gesture every reader knows. The alchemists named — Griffolino of Arezzo (burnt at the stake at Siena for offering to teach the local nobility to fly) and Capocchio (a Florentine known personally to Dante, who will name himself at the canto's close as of Nature an excellent ape) — are not great historical figures. They are local practitioners of a discredited science, and the bolgia is their indignified retirement.
The Sienese joke
The canto's last twenty lines are a small acid riff at the expense of Siena. Dante asks Virgil, with mock-surprise, whether any people was ever as vain as the Sienese, and Capocchio answers by listing the great spendthrifts of the Brigata Spendereccia — a Sienese aristocratic club of the previous generation famous for inventing competitions in how to squander a patrimony. Stricca, Niccolò (the discoverer of the luxurious use / Of cloves), Caccia d'Ascian, Abbagliato (the Dazzled One). The names mean little outside Tuscan civic memory and the canto knows it; the point is the catalogue, and the implied judgment is that the city which produced these noblemen had no claim to seriousness. Dante is, throughout the Inferno, a Florentine settling Italian accounts. Canto XXIX is one of his most local registers of the rivalry — and the fact that he is willing to spend the closing tercets of an entire canto on a piece of Tuscan civic mockery tells the reader something about what the Commedia, for all its theological frame, never stops being.
Famous and meaningful passages
The pilgrim cannot stop looking back.
The many people and the divers wounds These eyes of mine had so inebriated, That they were wishful to stand still and weep; But said Virgilius: What dost thou still gaze at? Why is thy sight still riveted down there Among the mournful, mutilated shades? Thou hast not done so at the other Bolge; Consider, if to count them thou believest, That two-and-twenty miles the valley winds. (Inf. XXIX.1–9)
Inebriated — inebriate — is the canto's first arresting word. The eyes are drunk on suffering. Virgil's rebuke, with its mathematical measurement of the bolgia's circumference, is the moralist's response to the contemplative's stupor.
Geri del Bello.
Be no longer broken Thy thought from this time forward upon him; Attend elsewhere, and there let him remain; For him I saw below the little bridge, Pointing at thee, and threatening with his finger Fiercely, and heard him called Geri del Bello. (Inf. XXIX.22–27)
The poem's most uncomfortable family moment. The cousin points; the poet looks; no word passes between them. Virgil's instruction let him remain is, in the context of the duty the pilgrim has just admitted to having failed, a small piece of Roman pragmatism: the dead are the dead, the bolgia is their place, the climb is the climb. The Christian register has nothing comforting to add.
The two alchemists.
I saw two sitting leaned against each other, As leans in heating platter against platter, From head to foot bespotted o'er with scabs; And never saw I plied a currycomb By stable-boy for whom his master waits, Or him who keeps awake unwillingly, As every one was plying fast the bite Of nails upon himself, for the great rage Of itching which no other succor had. And the nails downward with them dragged the scab. (Inf. XXIX.73–82)
The currycomb simile is the canto's tonal signature. The alchemists' fraud was the promise of transmuting cheap metal into gold; their punishment is to transmute their own skin into peelings, eternally, with no gold at the end.
Griffolino names his sin.
But unto the last Bolgia of the ten, For alchemy, which in the world I practised, Minos, who cannot err, has me condemned. (Inf. XXIX.118–120)
The familiar formula — Minos non errante / per la alchimia che nel mondo usai. The Minos of canto V continues to function as the Inferno's placement officer; every named soul, eventually, accounts to his judgment.
The Sienese joke.
Now was ever So vain a people as the Sienese? Not for a certainty the French by far. (Inf. XXIX.122–123)
The pilgrim's aside. The French were the medieval Italian byword for ostentation; to say a people exceeded them was the strongest available indictment. Dante hands the line to Capocchio to elaborate.
What to watch for
Watch the bolgia of the falsifiers stretch across two cantos. Canto XXIX has opened it; canto XXX will fill it. The four sub-types — falsifiers of metals (this canto), of persons (Gianni Schicchi and Myrrha in the next), of money (Master Adam), and of words (Sinon and Potiphar's wife) — share a punishment but not a disease. Each subtype gets its own malady. The bolgia is the Inferno's most explicit nosology.
Watch Dante's tonal range. The canto opens in tragedy (Geri's pointed finger) and closes in mockery (the Sienese spendthrifts). The poem's willingness to move between registers without warning will widen further in the next canto, where the most savage quarrel scene in the Inferno will be followed by Virgil's gentlest rebuke of the pilgrim for enjoying it.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.