Dante's weeping eyes have reminded commentators, beginning with Tommaseo, of Biblical sources, particularly Isaiah 16:9 and 34:7, as well as Ezechiel 23:33. The commentary of Durling and Martinez (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 458, suggests an echo of a passage in St. Augustine's Confessions (VI.8), when Alypius is described as becoming drunk on the sight of the blood spilled at the Roman games. For reference to this same passage in another connection (Inf. IX.58-60) see the note to Inferno IX.58-63.

Virgil's rebuke, reminiscent of that found in (Inf. XX.27-30), is particularly stern, as though Dante were guilty of the sort of appalling human ghoulishness that makes people today gather at the scenes of fatal accidents.

Virgil's sarcastic thrust for the first time in the poem offers us a measurement of the size of one of the areas of hell: this bolgia is twenty-two miles in circumference. (We will discover, at Inf. XXX.86, that the next bolgia's circumference is exactly half this one's.) These two measurements were the cause of an orgy of calculating in the Renaissance, involving no less a figure than Galileo in absurd plottings of an implausibly huge Inferno. For an account of these, see John Kleiner, Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante's “Comedy” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 23-56. Fabrizio Cacciafesta (“Un'osservazione sulla geometria delle Malebolge,” Letteratura italiana antica 4 [2003], pp. 397-99) points out the impossible landscape that Dante's measurement here and in the following canto (XXX.84-87) geometrically calls for: the walls separating bolgia from bolgia would have to be over one mile thick. As a result he would like us to consider the possibility that the passage in the next canto (XXX.86) that currently reads 'undici' (eleven) perhaps originally read 'ventun' (twenty-one). There is no manuscript evidence to support such a reading. Perhaps we need to accept the fact that Dante either was not conscious of every detail in his constructed afterworld or that, if he was, he enjoyed playing such games with his reader.

Castelvetro (comm. to verse 11) hears the echo here of the Sibyl's words in Aeneid VI.539, 'nox ruit, Aenea; nos flendo ducimus horas' (Night is coming, Aeneas; we waste the time in weeping). He goes on to add that Servius, in his commentary to Aeneid VI.255, pointed out that only a single day was granted by the gods for Aeneas's journey to the underworld. We understand that the same is true for Dante, whose voyage in hell takes exactly twenty-four hours.

Virgil's lunar time-telling suggests that, since Inferno XXI.112, some six hours have passed, making it ca. 1:30 pm now and leaving less than five hours for the completion of the journey.

Defending himself against the charge of idle curiosity, Dante informs Virgil that he was looking for the shade of a relative among the schismatics. The exchange shows that Virgil cannot in fact 'read' Dante's thoughts. See the note to Inferno XXIII.25-30.

For the word 'parte' as used here adverbially, as a Florentine provincialism meaning 'meanwhile,' see Benvenuto (comm. to vv. 16-21).

Virgil now adds some details to Canto XXVIII: he had seen Geri del Bello menace Dante while the protagonist was so preoccupied by Bertran de Born. This family drama runs as follows. Geri del Bello, Dante's father's cousin, was evidently something of a trouble-maker (he was once cited for attacking a man in Prato in 1280). He was murdered, perhaps at about this time, by a member of the Sacchetti family, and revenge was only achieved by another member of the Alighieri clan ca. 1310 (perhaps just as Dante was finishing Inferno). The details are far from clear, and the accounts in the early commentators diverge. See Simonetta Saffiotti Bernardi and Renato Piattoli, 'Alighieri, Geri' (ED.1970.1).

For the delicate interplay between Dante's aristocratic sense of the necessity of acting on behalf of his family's honor and his Christian knowledge that vengeance is the province of God alone, see Lino Pertile, “Canto XXIX: Such Outlandish Wounds,” in Lectura Dantis: “Inferno”, ed. A. Mandelbaum, A. Oldcorn, C. Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 378-84. Pertile also argues that Dante and Geri play out the roles of Aeneas and Dido in the underworld, when the guilty former lover fails to communicate with the shade of his offended dead paramour and leaves with his guilt unresolved (Aen. VI.450-476). Dante's feeling pio – piteous toward Geri – would seem to connect him with Virgil's pius Aeneas, who also honored his familiars.

The change in setting, from one bolgia to the other, is more abrupt than usual. The first thirty-six verses of the canto have been a sort of personal addendum to the last canto; the rest of it will combine with the next one to present the final ditch of the Malebolge, devoted to the punishment of forgery, in various forms: of metals (all in Canto XXIX), of persons, of coin, of words (all in Canto XXX). For the 'fraudulent' blending of metals by alchemists, those punished in the rest of this canto, see Sharon Meyer, “Dante's Alchemists,” Italian Quarterly 12 (1969), pp. 185-200.

These 'lay brothers' of the 'monastery' of the forgers are piteous in their aspect and in their groans; the protagonist, now of sterner stuff than he had been under the influence of his relative's unavenged murder, covers his ears (where he had feasted his drunken eyes at the beginning of the canto).

The Valdichiana and Maremma, in Tuscany, and Sardinia were all characterized by malarial outbreaks in the summer. Commentators speak of the special hospitals set up in the Valdichiana to deal with outbreaks of the disease.

They cross the last bridge, now seen as an entity, the long span (interrupted over the sixth bolgia) that traverses the extent of Malebolge.

God's unerring justice is portrayed as the punishing agent of the counterfeiters. But what does it mean that she records or 'registers' them? And where is 'here'? Most early commentators argued that 'here' referred to the bolgia. Beginning in the Renaissance, the majority believe that it refers to this world. But what sense does it make to say that justice 'registers' sinners in this world? The image is of writing down a person's name in a book. For a review of the debate over the line (57) see Hollander (“Dante's 'Book of the Dead': A Note on Inferno XXIX, 57,” Studi Danteschi 54 [1982], pp. 31-51), proposing that 'here' means 'this book,' i.e., Dante's Inferno, a solution that was put forth (although never discussed by later commentators) by John of Serravalle in the fifteenth century (comm. to Inf. XXIX.52-57). Dante will once again (and only once again) use the verb registrare: see Purgatorio XXX.63, when his name, 'Dante,' is 'registered here,' i.e., in his text.

Lino Pertile (“Qui in Inferno: deittici e cultura popolare,” Italian Quarterly 37 [2000], pp. 64-67) argues against this view, claiming that the reference of qui is to this world: 'God's justice punishes there in the tenth pouch the counterfeiters whom first she registers here on earth, when, still alive, they commit their sins' (p. 65). This explanation, which was first advanced by Gabriele and then Daniello in the sixteenth century, has the disadvantage of inventing a curious verbal concept: how may we conceive of justice 'registering' sins on earth? The essentially bookish nature of the word supports the hypothesis that Pertile would like to displace. Further, if we examine all 47 uses of this locative adverb (which appears some 190 times in the poem as a whole) that precede this passage, the result is telling. Whenever Dante or Virgil (or other characters in the poem) speak within the narrative, 'qui' usually refers to hell in general or to a specific place in it, and even, though much less often, to a moment in an exposition, e.g., Ciacco is described as one who 'Qui puose fine al lagrimabil suono' (with that he ended his distressing words – Inf. VI.76 [the same phenomenon is observed when Dante speaks as character, as at Inf. X.96, at Inf. XVI.127, and at Inf. XIX.88, or when Virgil does so at Inf. XIV.120 and Inf. XXIX.23]). Still further, when Dante speaks as narrator, looking back upon his experience (e.g., Inf. VII.25), he once also indicates a place in hell and not the earth. Not once, before this passage, does qui refer to this world. It will do so for the first and only time in Inferno (Inf. XXXII.15) when Dante/narrator addresses the treacherous imprisoned in the ice of Cocytus: 'O you misgotten rabble... better had you here been sheep or goats!' However, when, as narrator, he refers to a place indicated by the adverb qui he elsewise indicates his poem: Inferno II.9, XXV.143. And for exactly the same phenomenon, see Purgatorio I.7, I.9, VIII.19, and XXX.63 (where qui and registrare are reunited, as was previously noted). He will also use qui to refer to the poem four times in Paradiso (Par. I.16, Par. V.109, Par. XVIII.9, Par. XXX.16). In short, Pertile's reading, following the interpretation that became normative after the sixteenth-century interventions of Gabriele and his student, Daniello, has less support in Dante's usual practice than one might at first believe, and none deriving from a passage occurring before the one that we are studying. (For qui referring to the earth there are more instances in the last two cantiche [and especially the last one] than the single case found in the first: Purg. X.96, Purg. XXXII.61, Par. II.12, Par. II.37, Par. IX.71, Par. XII.16, Par. XIV.25, Par. XIV.112, Par. XVIII.22, Par. XVIII.128, Par. XXI.141.) What we can say with clear evidence is that when a first-time reader encounters the adverb in this passage Dante's previous usage would encourage the belief that 'here' refers to his book.

For another participant in the sixteenth-century debate over the claims for truthfulness put forward by Dante on behalf of his poem, see Stefano Jossa's study (“La 'verità' della Commedia. I Discorsi sopra Dante di Sperone Speroni,” Rivista di Studi Danteschi 1 [(2001], pp. 221-41), which grounds itself in the considerations of Bernard Weinberg's chapter “The Quarrel over Dante” (in A History of Literary Criticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], vol. II, pp. 819-911).

Details from Ovid's lengthy account of the plague, sent by Juno, on the island of Aegina (Metam. VII.523-657) is here used in simile to describe the falsifiers, who have become plague-blasted shades of humans because of their counterfeiting, in which that which is worth less is made to seem worth more. That their affliction is an infernal version of leprosy (some commentators believe it is scabies [see v. 82]) is attested by Umberto Bosco, 'lebbroso' (ED.1971.3) and in his commentary to Inferno XXIX.124, on the basis of medieval medical treatises, some of which report that scabies is a secondary symptom of leprosy. Capocchio, the second of the two sinners revealed here, is described as 'leprous' (v. 124).

In verse 63 Dante takes mere poetic fictiveness to task. In Convivio IV.xxvii.17 he had referred to this story as a favola [fable]). His 'real' sinners may resemble the plague-victims in Ovid's fanciful tale; unlike them, however, they are not present in a fable, but in a truthful narrative. Here Dante's insistence on the veracity of what he relates is so challenging that we can see the wink in his eye. We know that Ovid's tale of the restoration of the depleted human population of the island from the eggs of ants is literally untrue. And surely we have similar reservations about the truthfulness of Dante's. We are led ineluctably to realize two things: (1) Dante is a fabulator, like Ovid, not a 'historian'; (2) it is nonetheless necessary to his plan to insist that he is not a 'mere poet,' but one who has been given an experience of what is real and true. For a study of this problem see Hollander, “Dante Theologus-Poeta,” Dante Studies 94 (1976), pp. 91-136.

The three rapid comparisons are the very stuff of homely poetry: pans on a stove, stable-boys currying horses, cooks' helpers cleaning fish. We have seen precisely this stylistic range before, paired similetic passages describing the same thing in two very different registers, that of classical myth deployed alongside that of 'scenes from everyday life.' Among other things, this second register, with its ordinary, even ugly, names of things in the real world, helps us 'believe' that Dante's poetry is in fact 'true,' while Ovid's is not – even as we acknowledge that Dante is as much a fabulator as was Ovid.

Even Virgil's ironic captatio reflects the low style of things in this scene.

Griffolino d'Arezzo was in fact burned at the stake for a charge of heresy brought by Albero di Siena, perhaps the natural son of the bishop of Siena, ca. 1270. Thus he was put to death for a sin he did not commit, but condemned by God for the one he did: falsifying metals. Dante obviously enjoyed telling this tale of bufoonish credulity, in which Griffolino failed in his role of Daedalus to Albero's Icarus, and which would have fit a novella of Boccaccio, even though it is not even tangent to the sin punished here.

Florentines love to belittle the Sienese; Italians love to belittle the French. Dante gets two for one.

Capocchio was burned alive as an alchemist in 1293. As was the case when we listened to Griffolino, what we first hear about from him does not concern falsification, but another topic altogether – the luxurious living of the Sienese, down to their over-indulgence in the use of cloves to season their food. This is exemplified in Stricca the spendthrift; Niccolò the gourmet; and Caccia d'Asciano, with Abbagliato, part of the notorious brigata spendereccia (spendthrift society) of Siena, which liked to gather to eat and drink and then destroy the plates and service while they were at it.

For the use of cloves in cooking see Marcella Roddewig, “'La costuma ricca del garofano' ed i buongustai del tempo di Dante,” in Per le nozze di Corallo di Enzo Esposito e Citty Mauro (Ravenna: Longo, 1990), pp. 109-15.

Capocchio was, according to some early commentators, known to Dante in their early days as students. He was supposedly a particularly adept imitator of the words and gestures of others, a talent which he later extended to 'alchemical' malfeasance, to his cost. For the concept of the ape as mimic, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963 [1948]), pp. 538-40.