Inferno XXXIII — Ugolino Begins to Speak

Before reading

This is the most quoted canto in Inferno's last twenty. It is built around a single uninterrupted monologue — a father's account of being walled up in a tower with his children and starved to death — and around one of the ambiguous lines in world literature. Read it slowly. The interpretive load is in five Italian words at line seventy-five.

Where the canto sits

The pilgrim is still on the ice of Cocytus. Canto XXXII closed with the image of two heads frozen in one hole, the upper eternally gnawing the back of the lower's skull, and with Dante's question to the upper figure — tell me the wherefore. This canto opens with the answer. Ugolino della Gherardesca lifts his mouth from the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini and tells, in seventy-five lines of unbroken speech, what was done to him. After the monologue closes, the canto moves on into the third ring of Cocytus, Ptolomea — the ring of those who betrayed their guests — for one further encounter and the canto's most theologically arresting claim about the soul.

What it helps to know

Count Ugolino della Gherardesca (c. 1220–1289) was one of the most powerful men in late thirteenth-century Pisa — a Ghibelline by lineage but politically opportunistic, allied at various points with Guelphs, with Sardinian local powers, and with the Florentine Guelph hegemony. In 1284, after the catastrophic Pisan naval defeat at the battle of Meloria against Genoa, Ugolino took effective rule of Pisa and, the chroniclers allege, ceded several Pisan fortresses to neighbouring Guelph cities in order to consolidate his own internal power. In 1288 he was overthrown by a coalition led by Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini of Pisa, his nominal ally. Ruggieri had him sealed into a tower called the Torre della Muda (afterward known as the Tower of Hunger) along with two of his sons (Gaddo and Uguccione) and two of his grandsons (Anselmuccio and Brigata, generally called the children by the chroniclers and by the canto). The key was thrown into the Arno. The five were left to starve. They died in late February 1289. Ugolino was, in 1300, about eleven years dead.

The canto presents Ugolino as both the wronged party (Ruggieri's betrayal of him being one of the dictionary cases of treachery to a political ally — Antenora) and as the agent of an ambiguous final act in the tower (which has been read, for seven hundred years, in two incompatible ways). The line at issue, in the Italian, is poscia, più che 'l dolor, poté 'l digiuno — then more than grief had power the fasting, in Longfellow's translation. The line stands as the canto's last word on what happened in the tower, and it stands deliberately open.

The third ring of Cocytus, which the canto enters in its closing tercets, is named Ptolomea after Ptolemy the governor of Jericho who in 1 Maccabees 16 invited his father-in-law and two of his brothers-in-law to a feast and murdered them. The sin punished here is treachery to guests — the medieval reading held the hospitality relationship as one of the deepest available bonds of trust, and its violation as one of the worst available sins. The canto closes on a piece of metaphysics specific to Ptolomea: certain souls in this ring, the canto claims, descend to Hell before they die — the body remains alive on earth, occupied by a demon, while the soul is already frozen in the ice. The claim is presented as theological fact; the canto names two contemporary Italians whose bodies were, at the moment the Commedia describes them, still walking around above ground.

The canto closes on a savage apostrophe to Genoa, the city of one of the two betrayers named. The previous bolge had cursed Florence and Pisa; this one, Genoa. Dante's catalogue of Italian civic villainy is, by canto XXXIII, almost complete.

What to read for

Listen to Ugolino's voice. He is not penitent. He is not philosophical. He is a father telling, with shocking clarity and shocking selectivity, the story of his own destruction. Pay attention to what he says about his children and what he does not say. The canto leaves things in the white space.

Read the famous closing line of his monologue twice. The Italian digiuno means fasting — and fasting can mean either the cause of death (he died of hunger, which his grief had been unable to do) or an action he took (he was driven by hunger to do what grief alone would not have made him do). The poem will not tell you which. The reading you arrive at will say something about how you read the Inferno.

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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.

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After reading

What the canto did

The canto is built around a single uninterrupted monologue — the longest in the Inferno delivered by a damned soul — and around an ambiguous final line that has been read in two incompatible ways for seven hundred years. Ugolino della Gherardesca lifts his mouth from Archbishop Ruggieri's skull, wipes it on the hair of the same head, and tells, in seventy-five lines of unbroken speech, the story of his death by starvation in a sealed tower with his four sons and grandsons. Then the canto moves on to the third ring of Cocytus, Ptolomea, where it meets a Bolognese friar whose body is, the canto claims, still alive on earth though his soul is here in the ice — and where it closes on a savage apostrophe to Genoa. The famous lines are concentrated in the first half. The metaphysical novelty is in the second.

Ugolino's selectivity

What Ugolino tells the pilgrim is the story of his death, not the story of his life. The political treachery for which he is in Antenora — the ceded fortresses, the alliances broken, the betrayals of his own Pisan party — gets no mention in his speech. He acknowledges that the world knows the broad outline of his ruin (The fame I have, who am Count Ugolino, / And this one was Ruggieri the Archbishop, / Now thou shalt hear why I am such a neighbour) and immediately turns to the cruel things the world does not yet know: the death in the tower. The selection is precise. Ugolino tells the story that establishes Ruggieri's guilt and tells nothing that would establish his own. He is, in his speech, exclusively a wronged father. The poem allows him to be exclusively that. Whether the Commedia's placement of him in Antenora — among traitors to political community, the ring at which Ugolino in life is generally agreed to have belonged — should be read as the poem's quiet correction of the speaker's self-portrait is one of the canto's interpretive questions.

The dream of the wolf and the mountain

The story of the tower opens not with the imprisonment but with a dream:

Already, when I dreamed the evil dream Which of the future rent for me the veil. This one appeared to me as lord and master, Hunting the wolf and whelps upon the mountain For which the Pisans cannot Lucca see. With sleuth-hounds gaunt, and eager, and well trained, Gualandi with Sismondi and Lanfranchi He had sent out before him to the front. After brief course seemed unto me forespent The father and the sons, and with sharp tushes It seemed to me I saw their flanks ripped open. (Inf. XXXIII.26–36)

The dream is the canto's most efficient piece of political compression. The hunt is on the mountain for which the Pisans cannot Lucca see — Monte San Giuliano, the ridge between Pisa and Lucca, the local geography Ugolino would have known by sight. The huntsman is Ruggieri. The hounds run ahead of the master are named — Gualandi, Sismondi, Lanfranchi — three of the great Pisan Ghibelline families who supported Ruggieri's coup. The wolf and the whelps are the father and the children. The dream tells Ugolino everything he needs to know about what is about to happen, before he wakes to find that what he dreamed is already in progress. The poem's most ancient image of political violence — the wolf-hunt — is here repurposed for the moral level. The hunt of the great is also the hunt of the small. The whelps die with the wolf.

The children offer their flesh

The most painful passage in the canto is the offer:

As now a little glimmer made its way Into the dolorous prison, and I saw Upon four faces my own very aspect, Both of my hands in agony I bit; And, thinking that I did it from desire Of eating, on a sudden they uprose, And said they: Father, much less pain 't will give us If thou do eat of us; thyself didst clothe us With this poor flesh, and do thou strip it off. (Inf. XXXIII.55–63)

The detail is deliberate. The children misread the gesture. Ugolino is biting his own hands in grief — the canto's standard image of inexpressible private pain, here brought into the physical foreground — and the children, seeing only the bite, think their father is so hungry that he is beginning to eat himself. They offer their own bodies, in the formal Christian language of clothing and stripping. Tu ne vestisti / queste misere carni, e tu le spoglia. The line is one of the Commedia's most painful examples of the way the language of Eucharistic theology — the flesh offered, the body broken — can be turned, by a misreading inside a sealed tower, into a domestic horror. Ugolino calms himself, not to make them more sad. The whole tragedy of the tower is in the recoil of that one verb.

The ambiguous line

The monologue closes on the most-debated single line in the Inferno:

And there he died; and, as thou seest me, I saw the three fall one by one, between The fifth day and the sixth; whence I betook me, Already blind, to groping over each, And three days called them after they were dead; Then hunger did what sorrow could not do. (Inf. XXXIII.70–75)

Poscia, più che 'l dolor, poté 'l digiuno. Longfellow's Then hunger did what sorrow could not do preserves the deliberate ambiguity of the original. The verb poté, was able, has no specified object. There are two principal readings, and the canto withholds the choice.

The first reading: hunger then did to me what grief had not been able to do — that is, hunger killed me, since grief had been unable to. On this reading, Ugolino dies of starvation, the canto's last image of him is a father who has tried and failed to die of grief at his children's deaths and now dies of the same hunger that killed them. The reading is the orthodox one and the comforting one.

The second reading: hunger then accomplished what grief alone could not — that is, hunger, after the children were dead and their bodies lay in the cell with him for three days, drove me to eat them. The reading is medieval and persistent. It is consistent with Ugolino's punishment in Hell — eternally gnawing the body of his enemy — and with the canto's earlier image of bread through hunger devoured. It is the reading on which the children's offer of their own flesh in line 63 becomes a tragic anticipation: the father refuses the offer while they are alive and accepts what is left when they are dead.

The poem will not arbitrate. The most-cited single line of the Commedia leaves its central question open, and the openness is the point. The reader who arrives at the orthodox reading is reading Ugolino as Ugolino reads himself. The reader who arrives at the second is reading Ugolino as the poem places him — among the traitors, in eternal cannibal posture with the body of his enemy, the punishment a mirror of an act the speaker would not consent to confess.

The apostrophe to Pisa

The canto's most concentrated political curse follows the monologue:

Ah! Pisa, thou opprobium of the people Of the fair land there where the Sì doth sound, Since slow to punish thee thy neighbors are, Let the Capraia and Gorgona move, And make a hedge across the mouth of Arno, That every person in thee it may drown! For if Count Ugolino had the fame Of having in thy castles thee betrayed, Thou shouldst not on such cross have put his sons. (Inf. XXXIII.79–87)

The two islands at the mouth of the Arno — Capraia and Gorgona — are invoked to move and dam the river so that Pisa drowns. The apostrophe is the canto's clearest statement that, whatever Ugolino's own guilt as a traitor, the destruction of his innocent grandchildren is a Pisan civic crime of a different order. Thou shouldst not on such cross have put his sons. The canto distinguishes, in this single tercet, between the punishment of a guilty father and the murder of his children — and finds Pisa unforgivable for not having made the distinction.

Ptolomea and the soul that descends before the body dies

The third ring of Cocytus, into which the canto moves in its closing forty lines, is the ring of those who betrayed their guests. The named soul is Friar Alberigo, a Bolognese member of the Frati Gaudenti (the Jovial Friars Dante had already met in canto XXIII), who in 1285 invited two of his political enemies — his own kinsmen — to a banquet at his villa and had them murdered between courses. The signal was reportedly the words bring the fruit; the fruit of Friar Alberigo became proverbial for treacherous hospitality. He is fixed in the ice with his frozen tears sealing his eyes shut.

Alberigo's contribution to the canto is the most theologically arresting detail in the lower Inferno. He claims — and the canto presents the claim as fact — that certain souls in Ptolomea descend to Hell before they die. The body remains on earth, occupied by a demon, going about its business; the soul is already here in the ice:

Such an advantage has this Ptolomæa, That oftentimes the soul descendeth here Sooner than Atropos in motion sets it. (Inf. XXXIII.124–126)

Know that as soon as any soul betrays As I have done, his body by a demon Is taken from him, who thereafter rules it, Until his time has wholly been revolved. (Inf. XXXIII.129–132)

The claim is unique in the Commedia. It is also pointed. Alberigo names the man frozen beside him as Branca d'Oria, a Genoese nobleman who in 1275 invited his father-in-law Michel Zanche (already in Hell, in the bolgia of barrators) to a feast and murdered him at table. Branca d'Oria was still alive — and well, and politically active — in Genoa at the time Dante was writing. The claim that his body was a demon-wearing shell while his soul was already in the ninth circle is the Commedia's most aggressive piece of personal denunciation by metaphysics. Dante is not satisfied to wait for his enemies to die. He places them in Hell while they still walk.

The closing apostrophe to Genoa

The canto's last six lines turn from Pisa to Genoa, completing the diptych of Italian civic curse:

Ah, Genoese! ye men at variance With every virtue, full of every vice! Wherefore are ye not scattered from the world? For with the vilest spirit of Romagna I found of you one such, who for his deeds In soul already in Cocytus bathes, And still above in body seems alive. (Inf. XXXIII.151–157)

In soul already in Cocytus bathes, / And still above in body seems alive. The most concise expression of the doctrine the canto has just announced, and the Commedia's most direct accusation against a living man.

Famous and meaningful passages

The opening of the monologue.

His mouth uplifted from his grim repast, That sinner, wiping it upon the hair Of the same head that he behind had wasted. Then he began: Thou wilt that I renew The desperate grief, which wrings my heart already To think of only, ere I speak of it; But if my words be seed that may bear fruit Of infamy to the traitor whom I gnaw, Speaking and weeping shalt thou see together. (Inf. XXXIII.1–9)

Memorise the first three lines. Wiping it upon the hair / Of the same head that he behind had wasted is one of the most domesticated horrors anywhere in the Inferno: the wiped mouth, the precise indication of the napkin (the hair of the man being eaten), the absolute composure of the gesture.

The dream.

This one appeared to me as lord and master, Hunting the wolf and whelps upon the mountain For which the Pisans cannot Lucca see. (Inf. XXXIII.28–30)

The mountain for which the Pisans cannot Lucca see. The local geography compressed into one of the Commedia's most-quoted geographical phrases.

The children's offer.

Said they: Father, much less pain 't will give us If thou do eat of us; thyself didst clothe us With this poor flesh, and do thou strip it off. (Inf. XXXIII.61–63)

Tu ne vestisti queste misere carni, e tu le spoglia. The Eucharistic vocabulary mistakenly applied. The most painful line a child speaks in the Inferno.

The ambiguous closing.

And there he died; and, as thou seest me, I saw the three fall one by one, between The fifth day and the sixth; whence I betook me, Already blind, to groping over each, And three days called them after they were dead; Then hunger did what sorrow could not do. (Inf. XXXIII.70–75)

Poscia, più che 'l dolor, poté 'l digiuno. The five Italian words on which the canto's whole interpretive load is balanced. The orthodox reading is hunger killed me. The persistent reading is hunger made me eat them. The poem allows both.

The apostrophe to Pisa.

Ah! Pisa, thou opprobium of the people Of the fair land there where the Sì doth sound, Since slow to punish thee thy neighbors are, Let the Capraia and Gorgona move, And make a hedge across the mouth of Arno, That every person in thee it may drown! (Inf. XXXIII.79–84)

The fair land there where the Sì doth sound — del bel paese là dove 'l sì suona — is the Commedia's most beautiful periphrasis for Italy, named here by its commonest word for yes. The curse turns the loveliest description of the country into the introduction to its filthiest city.

The metaphysics of Ptolomea.

Such an advantage has this Ptolomæa, That oftentimes the soul descendeth here Sooner than Atropos in motion sets it. (Inf. XXXIII.124–126)

The most theologically aggressive claim the Inferno makes. Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread of life, is beaten to her work by the speed of damnation in the third ring of Cocytus.

The closing curse on Genoa.

Ah, Genoese! ye men at variance With every virtue, full of every vice! Wherefore are ye not scattered from the world? (Inf. XXXIII.151–153)

The catalogue of Italian civic curses, by canto XXXIII, has named Florence, Pisa, Bologna, Siena, Lucca, Romagna, and Genoa. The Commedia is a poem of exile, and its civic bitterness is the proof.

What to watch for

Watch how the Inferno's narrative shape works. Ugolino's monologue is the longest single speech in Hell; it occupies more lines than any one speech the pilgrim has heard since Francesca's in canto V. The two speeches frame the Inferno's emotional arc. Both are by figures whose self-presentation is exclusively victim. Both are by figures whose placement in Hell is the poem's quiet correction of that self-presentation. The reader who has carried Francesca through twenty-eight cantos is the reader the canto wants for Ugolino.

Watch the bottom. One canto remains. The pilgrim has reached the third ring of the ninth circle. The fourth ring — Judecca — is the centre, where Lucifer is fixed. Canto XXXIV will be a study in how an absolute centre can also be a turning-point.

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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.