Purgatorio · Canto XIII ·
Purgatorio XIII — The Bare Terrace
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 47 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XIII
Before reading
This is the canto in which the terrace of envy opens. The pilgrim has just climbed out of pride with one P erased and his step gone light; he steps onto the second terrace and finds it empty. No carvings, no figures, no road markings — only bare livid stone. The terrace will fill, slowly, with voices first and bodies later. The poem is showing the reader what envy looks like before it shows what envy is.
Where the canto sits
Each terrace of Purgatory teaches by the same threefold pattern: examples of the virtue that opposes the sin, the punishment of the sin, examples of the sin punished. On the terrace of pride, all three panels were stone carvings — the walls and the pavement. On the terrace of envy they will be invisible. The examples of the opposite virtue, generosity, come as disembodied voices flying past unseen. The examples of envy defeated, in the next canto, will also come as voices. The penitents themselves, when they appear, will not be able to see anything — their eyelids have been sewn shut with iron wire. A whole terrace organised around the failure of sight.
What it helps to know
The three voices that fly past in this canto each carry a famous example of generosity, and each is given in a single line of direct speech. The first is Mary's at the wedding at Cana — Vinum non habent, they have no wine — the moment in John 2 when Mary notices the failure of someone else's hospitality and quietly arranges the miracle that will save the bridegroom's reputation. The second is the cry of Pylades — I am Orestes! — the moment in classical legend when the friend tried to die in his friend's place, each insisting he was the one the executioners wanted. The third is Christ's command from the Sermon on the Mount: love those from whom ye have had evil. Mary at a wedding, two pagan friends at an execution, Christ on a hillside: three figures from three traditions, all offering the same opposite of envy.
The penitent the pilgrim will meet is Sapia of Siena. The pun is the poem's: Sapia in Italian sounds like sapiente, wise — and the woman will tell Dante, with great dryness, that wise she was not, despite the name. She was a Sienese noblewoman who, during the war between Florentine Guelphs and Sienese Ghibellines, watched the battle of Colle di Val d'Elsa (1269) from her window and rejoiced when her own city's army was crushed and her own nephew Provenzan Salvani was killed. She prayed for the defeat of her own kin. Her envy was so total she would rather see her city fall than see her enemies (within it) prosper. She is the perfect first example of the sin.
The hermit she names at the end of the canto, Pier Pettinaio (Peter the Comb-Seller), was a thirteenth-century Sienese craftsman who lived a life of austere holiness selling combs at the market and died in 1289 with a local cult that lasted for centuries. He is one of Dante's quiet portraits of unofficial sanctity — the working-class saint whose prayers, from outside the Church's official structures, reach further than those of bishops.
What to read for
Listen for the way the canto teaches by deprivation. The proud were forced to look down at carvings; the envious are forced not to look at all. A terrace organised around eyes sewn shut is a terrace that asks the reader to attend by ear. The voices that fly past are all there is to see.
Notice the political teeth of the canto. Sapia rejoiced at the defeat of her own city. The historical reader will hear under the line everything Dante is not saying about Florence — the city that, in his own day, prayed against itself in similar ways. Envy in Dante is not a private vice; it is the engine that destroys civic life.
Notice the final request. Sapia ends by asking Dante to clear her name among her kin when he returns. The dead, in this poem, still care about what is said of them on earth. Pay attention to how often the souls of Purgatory ask for prayer rather than fame — and notice when they ask for both.
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 opened the second terrace and made the reader, almost immediately, lose one of the senses with which the Commedia had hitherto been read. The terrace was bare: no carving on the wall, no relief on the pavement, no figure on the road. The examples of generosity that on every other terrace would have been seen came instead as three disembodied voices flying past in turn — Mary at Cana, Pylades to Orestes, Christ on the hillside. Then the penitents themselves appeared, and the loss of sight became the punishment as well as the pedagogy: their eyelids had been pierced with iron wire and sewn closed. The pilgrim met one of them, a Sienese noblewoman named Sapia, who confessed in clear voice that she had rejoiced when her own city was crushed in battle and her own nephew was killed. She named a hermit comb-seller as the man whose prayers had shortened her purgation. She asked Dante to clear her name when he returned to the living. The canto is one of the Purgatorio's clearest demonstrations of the structural principle that every penance, in this poem, is the inverse posture of the sin it cures.
The terrace organised around the failure of sight
Envy — invidia — comes from the Latin in-videre, to look against, to look at someone with malice, to see another's good and to grieve over it. The sin is, etymologically, a misuse of the eyes. Dante takes the etymology with absolute literalness: the penance is to lose the use of the eyes altogether. The wire that pierces the lids is the wire used on hunting hawks — as to a sparhawk wild is done, because it will not quiet stay. The image is sourced precisely from the falconer's craft: when a young raptor is too wild to train, the eyes are stitched shut until it has been gentled. The envious are wild birds being broken to harness. The simile is not gentle; it is exact.
The corresponding examples of the virtue opposite envy are also not seen. Generosity — the impulse to rejoice at another's good rather than to grieve over it — is reported through the air as the cry of figures who never become visible. Mary at Cana speaks for Old Testament generosity, two friends offering to die in each other's place for the great pagan tradition of amicitia, and Christ for the new commandment that pushes generosity past affection into love of enemies. The three together form the canto's positive theology, delivered as a kind of sourceless music.
Sapia and the politics of self-hatred
Sapia of Siena is the canto's only named soul, and the choice is surgical. The battle of Colle di Val d'Elsa (June 1269) was the decisive Florentine Guelph victory that broke Sienese Ghibelline power for a generation; Sapia's nephew Provenzan Salvani, the great Ghibelline leader of Siena, was captured during the rout and beheaded. The historical Sapia would have lost her closest male kin in the defeat she rejoiced at. The canto reports her admission without softening it: I was at another's harm more happy far than at my own good fortune. Her envy did not stop at private spite; it ran all the way through her loyalty to family, city, and faction. She prayed against her own.
The political reading is not buried. Dante was writing in exile from Florence, watching from outside as the city of his birth tore itself apart in factional wars between Black and White Guelphs. Sapia's joy at her city's defeat is a mirror Dante is holding up to his own Florentines — and through them, to every Italian commune of his time. Envy is the engine of civil war. The poem will name it again, more brutally, in the next canto. Here it is given a face — a woman at a window, hands raised in joy at her own people's slaughter — and a name that puns on wisdom.
Pier Pettinaio and the question of who saves whom
Sapia tells Dante that her purgation has been shortened by the prayers of Pier Pettinaio, the comb-seller. Pier was a real Sienese craftsman who lived as a Franciscan tertiary, sold combs at the market, and died in 1289 with a local cult that the city's bishop confirmed but Rome never canonised. He is one of Dante's quiet portraits of unofficial sanctity. The Commedia's economy of intercession is being demonstrated: the woman who could not bear to see her neighbours prosper is helped, in death, by the prayers of a working-class layman who never held office or learning. The order of the world is reversed inside the mountain. The aristocrat's purgation depends on the comb-seller. Note also what the line does not contain. Sapia does not say she was helped by the prayers of a pope, a bishop, an abbot, or a priest. The chain of effective intercession in this poem keeps running outside the official Church.
Sapia closes by asking Dante to clear her name among her surviving kin and to call her out of the wicked rumour that still attaches to her in Siena. The request is significant: the souls of Purgatory care about reputation as well as prayer. The dead are still vulnerable to what is said of them on earth. Throughout this cantica, the pilgrim will be asked, again and again, to report back — to tell the living that the dead are alive, that they need prayer, that the rumours about them may be wrong. The Commedia is, at one level, a sustained answer to those requests.
Famous and meaningful passages
The bareness of the arrival.
Shade is there none, nor sculpture that appears; So seems the bank, and so the road seems smooth, With but the livid colour of the stone. (Purg. XIII.7–9)
The eye is given nothing to rest on. The terrace announces, before any soul appears, that what is to be learned here will not be learned by looking. Livid — livido — is the precise colour of envy in the medieval tradition: the bluish-grey pallor of bruised flesh.
The first voice.
The first voice that passed onward in its flight, Vinum non habent, said in accents loud, And went reiterating it behind us. (Purg. XIII.28–30)
Mary at Cana, three Latin words from John 2:3. Generosity begins with the act of noticing what another lacks. The line passes overhead and continues to repeat itself as it recedes — the example is not given once but echoes away across the terrace.
The second voice.
And ere it wholly grew inaudible Because of distance, passed another, crying, I am Orestes! and it also stayed not. (Purg. XIII.31–33)
Pylades crying I am Orestes to draw the executioners onto himself in his friend's place — the canonical classical example of substitutionary friendship. The cry is one of the most famous in ancient legend; Cicero and Ovid both report it. The voice does not pause; the example flies past.
The third voice.
And even as I asked, behold the third, Saying: Love those from whom ye have had evil! (Purg. XIII.40–42, with the third line falling into Virgil's reply.)
Christ's command from the Sermon on the Mount, given in Latin in the Italian and Englished here. Love of enemies as the most extreme form of generosity — the absolute opposite of envy, which cannot bear even the prosperity of friends.
The wire.
For all their lids an iron wire transpierces, And sews them up, as to a sparhawk wild Is done, because it will not quiet stay. (Purg. XIII.70–72)
The falconer's image. The envious are wild hawks being broken to harness by the same craft used on the hunting birds of the medieval court. Dante's metaphors are nearly always sourced from the working practice of his time.
Sapia names herself.
Sienese was I, it replied, and with The others here recleanse my guilty life, Weeping to Him to lend himself to us. Sapient I was not, although I Sapia Was called, and I was at another's harm More happy far than at my own good fortune. (Purg. XIII.106–111)
The pun. Savia non fui, avvegna che Sapia fossi chiamata. The most quoted line in the canto and one of the Commedia's sharpest acts of self-naming. The admission that follows — more happy at another's harm than at my own good — is the textbook definition of envy in medieval moral theology, delivered as autobiography.
The view from the window.
My fellow-citizens near unto Colle Were joined in battle with their adversaries, And I was praying God for what he willed. Routed were they, and turned into the bitter Passes of flight; and I, the chase beholding, A joy received unequalled by all others. (Purg. XIII.115–120)
The historical scene, named with a place and a date the first Florentine readers would have recognised at once. Colle di Val d'Elsa, 1269 — and the Sienese woman at her window, watching her own army broken and rejoicing.
The hermit who saved her.
Had it not been that in remembrance held me Pier Pettinaio in his holy prayers, Who out of charity was grieved for me… (Purg. XIII.127–129)
The comb-seller saint of Siena. The aristocrat's purgation depends on the layman's prayers. One of the Commedia's many small reversals of medieval social order.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto. The terrace of envy does not end here; XIV will continue it with two more souls, Guido del Duca and Rinieri da Calboli, whose envy was less the spite of one woman against her city than the long civic envy of one Romagnole valley against the next. The geography of Italian envy will be laid out in detail.
Watch the voices. The terrace's examples of the sin punished — the dark side of the threefold pattern — will arrive at the end of the next canto, again as voices, again unseen. The whole terrace of envy is conducted at the level of sound. Sight returns only at the gate.
Watch the clearing of the name. Sapia's request — that Dante speak well of her among her kin — is the first of many such requests in the Purgatorio. The poem is, in part, a fulfilment of every one of them. The dead are asking the living poet to remember them rightly, and the poem he is going to write will be that remembering.
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.