The complications of political intrigue lie behind the story that we are about to hear. For a review, in English, see Singleton (comm. to XXXIII.17-18). The main particulars are as follows. Count Ugolino della Gherardesca (ca. 1220-1289) was of a Ghibelline family of Pisa. In 1275 he joined with the Guelph Visconti family in order to advance his own political ambitions, but failed to do so when his plans became known and he was banished. He returned to Pisa and now joined with the Archbishop, Ruggieri degli Ubaldini (nephew of Ottaviano degli Ubaldini [Inf. X.120]), a Ghibelline, and conspired with him against Judge Nino Visconti, a Guelph, and, in Dante's eyes, a good man (we see him, on his way to salvation, in Purg. VIII.53). In 1288 Ugolino and Ruggieri managed to force Nino to leave the city, thus allowing them a free hand. At this point, however, Ruggieri decided to be rid of Ugolino, and had him accused of 'betraying' Pisa by giving some of its outlying castles to the Florentines and the Lucchesi (he had in fact been trying to negotiate a political advantage to Pisa in these dealings). With that as an excuse, Ruggieri had Ugolino imprisoned in the summer of 1288, along with two sons and two grandsons (Dante has made the tale more pathetic by making all four of the children young – but Ugolino was in his sixties when the five of them were imprisoned). They were starved to death in February 1289.

Ugolino is found in Antenora, and thus was a betrayer of party or country. In what did his sin consist? Dante refers to the 'betrayal' involving the castles in v. 86, but seems to think this was only an accusation. However, his real treacherous behavior, in Dante's eyes, may have involved either his betrayal of his own Ghibelline party, or of the good forces in Pisa itself in his double-dealing with Judge Nino, who also happened to be his grandson.

Almost all admire the horror of this scene, Ugolino lifting his gore-stained mouth from Ruggieri's neck, then wiping it on the hair of his enemy's head. We may reflect that Ugolino is moved to cease his vengeful chewing by his hope for further, greater vengeance: Dante's recounting of his case against Ruggieri in the world above.

Ugolino's first words are nearly universally observed to be a citation of the opening of Aeneas's sad speech to Dido in Aeneid II.3-8, a passage also nearly universally cited for the beginning of Francesca's second speech to Dante (Inf. V.121-123). Why the repetition? Hollander (“A Note on Inferno XXXIII, 37-74: Ugolino's Importunity,” Speculum 59 [1964]), p. 550, suggests that it represents a sort of test for the reader, who now hears another 'sympathetic sinner' trying to capture the good will of the protagonist (and, indeed, of the reader) and is supposed to realize that this refrain has been heard before, similarly put to the service of exculpating a sinner by that very sinner.

For a second Virgilian resonance here see Aeneid I.209, where Aeneas hides the grief in his heart from his companions ('premit altum corde dolorem'); the echo of these words ('che 'l cor mi preme') was noted by Tommaseo (comm. to these verses) who observes the differing contexts.

The phrasing of Ugolino's hoped for fruition of infamy for Ruggieri possibly reflects the language of the parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-11), where Jesus interprets the seed as the word of God. In their commentary, Durling and Martinez (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 531, suggest the importance, for the images of fruition used both by Ugolino and Alberigo, of Matthew 7:20, 'by their fruits you shall know them.' Theodore Faunce (Princeton '73) many years ago suggested another biblical passage that comments adversely upon Ugolino's hope: 'For the fruit of the spirit is in all goodness and righteouness and truth' (Ephesians 5:9).

Both Francesca (Inf. V.126) and Ugolino weep and speak simultaneously, each of them in imitation of Aeneas's imagined hardened soldier, who would have to speak through tears if he had the fall of Troy to narrate (Aen. II.6-8). And both Francesca and Ugolino are accompanied by a companion who does not speak in Dante's presence.

Like Farinata (Inf. X.25), Ugolino recognizes Dante from his Florentine accent.

The story of Ugolino's imprisonment and death was familiar to all who lived in Tuscany. What Dante could not have known, Ugolino says, was how much he had suffered. The way in which he says this, on the other hand, indicates the sort of egotism that we will experience all through his speech. Here is a man who has experienced death in the company of his children; we do not even hear of them at first, since his attention is fixed entirely on himself. See Hollander, “A Note on Inferno XXXIII, 37-74: Ugolino's Importunity,” Speculum 59 (1964), p. 551.

The tower (the edifice remains, without its tower, in the Piazza dei Cavallieri in Pisa to this day) would not serve as prison many years into the fourteenth century, but it apparently still did so when Dante wrote these lines.

For the supposed greater truth of morning dreams see note to the note to Inferno XXVI.7.

Ugolino's dream turns out to have been completely accurate: Ruggieri, out hunting on Mount San Giuliano, is after Ugolino (the wolf) and his children (the cubs). He has set, ahead of the chase, the waiting ambushers, the Ghibelline leaders of Pisa, and with his hounds he is driving his victims toward them and to their destruction.

For the canine imagery in Cocytus and especially in this canto, see Giorgio Brugnoli, “Le 'cagne conte,'” in Filologia e critica dantesca: studi offerti a Aldo Vallone (Florence: Olschki, 1989), pp. 95-112.

Ugolino awakes from the dream to find its reality before his eyes, his children hungry in their sleep and crying for their daily bread, usually brought them in the morning (see vv. 43-44).

Ugolino is angered by the fact that Dante is not weeping. The protagonist, unlike most readers, has evidently found a moral vantage point from which there seems something wrong with this narration. Since we have seen him weep for other apparently less sympathetic figures, his lack of compassion might serve as a clue to us about our own reactions.

In this canto, vv. 5-75, words for weeping and grief (piangere, lagrimare, doglia, dolere, dolore, and doloroso) occur a total of thirteen times (see Hollander, Allegory in Dante's “Commedia” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 306). And see Vittorio Russo, “Il 'dolore' del conte Ugolino,” Sussidi di esegesi dantesca (Napoli: Liguori, 1966), pp. 147-81, for a wider study of this phenomenon.

Apparently the children have had a dream similar to their father's. The process of the starvation of Ugolino and his children roughly coincided with the Lenten season.

Ugolino's dream now has a finer point. He understands at once that they are to die, caught by the hunter Ruggieri and his men. His first impulse, which will be repeated, is to keep silent.

Ugolino, who has just criticized Dante for being cruel because he does not weep, now tells the protagonist that he himself did not weep when he perceived the fate of his sons and of himself. Indeed, he turned to stone. For Hollander (“A Note on Inferno XXXIII, 37-74: Ugolino's Importunity,” Speculum 59 [1964]), pp. 552-55, the key passage that stands behind this scene is found in Luke 11:5-13, Christ's parable of the importunate friend. A man is visited by a friend at midnight and goes to the house of another friend to seek bread in order to feed his guest. The importuned friend replies, 'Trouble me not, the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give you.' Christ comments on the parable, insisting that importuning will eventually work: 'If a son shall ask for bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?' The various details of the parable, in a form that is both parallel and antithetic to the action recounted here, find their place in Ugolino's narrative: the knocking on the door echoed in the hammer blows nailing up the prison, the man in bed with his children behind a locked door, and the father who will not give his son a stone when he asks for bread. Ugolino, however, gives his sons exactly that, a stony silence. When we ask ourselves what we would do in that situation, we probably know. We would speak, not be silent (see Steven Botterill, “Rereading Lancelot: Dante, Chaucer, and Le Chevalier de la Charrette,” Philological Quarterly 67 [1988], p. 287); we would weep with our children, not show Stoic reserve; and, if we were thirteenth-century Italians, we would pray with them after having sought their forgiveness for having involved them, innocent, in our political machinations. The opening passage of Luke 11 has a prayer for us, should we require one, for it is in that text that Jesus teaches his disciples what we know as 'the Lord's prayer.'

That Ugolino himself was involved in the pitiless slaying of the son of 'the good Marzucco' (Purg. VI.18) is attested by various early commentators, e.g., Benvenuto, saying that his source was Giovanni Boccaccio (Benvenuto's comm. to Purg. VI.16-18), the Anonimo Fiorentino (comm. to Purg. VI.16-18), and John of Serravalle (comm to Purg. VI.16-18). Whether the execution (by decapitation) was carried out under Ugolino's direct orders or not, it occurred in 1287 when Ugolino had returned to Pisa as its co-ruler (with Ruggieri), and necessarily would have indicated, in Dante's thoughts, Ugolino's complicity. If Dante wrote this scene with that belief in mind, it helps to explain his ironic treatment of Ugolino's appeal for pity.

Ugolino, silent, biting his hands from grief, causes the children to think that he is hungry and they offer themselves to him for food. They, like their father, can only think literally about nourishment, forgetting the symbolic eucharistic value of bread. Freccero (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986]), pp. 156-57, believes that their offer is eucharistic and spiritually motivated. This is the last conversation among them.

The father, thinking that display of his own sorrow will only increase the pain felt by his sons, teaches them his lesson: stoic silence in the face of death. Had Seneca written this canto, perhaps we would be justified in thinking Ugolino's reserve a valuable example of courage. The silence is only broken once more, on this fourth day, by Gaddo, dying, who asks the question the reader, too, might very well ask: 'O father, why won't you help me?' The drama of paternity that we find in this canto is not that proposed, in his beautiful essay, by Francesco De Sanctis (“L'Ugolino di Dante,” in his Opere, vol. 5 [Turin: Einaudi, 1967 (1869)], pp. 681-704), but that of a terribly failing father.

The total absence of religious concerns in Dante's portrait of Ugolino is in contrast to the tale that circulates in some of the commentaries, first in 1333 in the Ottimo (comm. to XXXIII.1-9), that Ugolino, realizing they were all to die, asked for a friar to confess them, and was refused. Had Dante included such a detail, his Ugolino would have seemed a much different man.

Only now that it is too late does Ugolino break the silence with his cries. It is the last heart-breaking detail of his failure as a father. The tale that he tells to win Dante's sympathy has also failed, as we shall see.

Did Ugolino ingest his children? For a history of the centuries-long debate see Hollander (“Ugolino's Supposed Cannibalism: A Bibliographical Note and Discussion,” Quaderni d'italianistica 6 [1985], pp. 64-81). For a strong argument in favor of the notion, see Ronald Herzman (“Cannibalism and Communion in Inferno XXXIII,” Dante Studies 98 [1980], pp. 53-78). To most, the position represented by Herzman and others, mainly (in recent years) Americans, seems a not convincing interpretation. In Singleton's view, it is a 'curious view,' one 'hardly worth a serious rebuttal' (comm. to XXXIII.75). This writer stands with Geoffrey Chaucer's view of the matter in the Monk's Tale, v. 2455: 'Hymself, despeired, eek for hunger starf' (and he, despairing, also [i.e., as the children had] died from hunger). One wishes that Chaucer had used a term for starvation, but that might not have rhymed or scanned. 'Digiuno' (fasting) is not the same thing as 'hunger.' And surely Chaucer knew that.

An observation in the commentary of Guido da Pisa also offers evidence that the number of days in the narrative (seven) is significant in this regard. Guido says, 'And lest it seem impossible that one could have lived six days without food, heed Macrobius on the Dream of Scipio. He says that the life of a man cannot last beyond seven days without food' (comm. to XXXIII.37-45). Pietro di Dante thinks of a biblical passage that also involves a seven-day fast. David fasted for seven days when his son by Bathsheba was stricken, and then was convinced by the priests to resume eating, lest he perish, upon the death of the child (II Samuel 12:15-23). If Dante, with his so carefully calculated seven days to starvation, is aware of this bit of medical lore, Ugolino died at the limit of human endurance without nourishment. Had he ingested the flesh of his children, he would have lived longer. Further, when the corpses were exhibited outside the tower, after their removal, the scandal of the teeth-torn flesh would have made the rounds. No such story did, with the exception of a variant, somewhat suspect, in text of the commentary of Jacopo della Lana. See Hollander, “Ugolino's Supposed Cannibalism: A Bibliographical Note and Discussion,” Quaderni d'italianistica 6 (1985), n. 24. For still another review of the question and a return to the cannibalistic reading see Fabrizio Franceschini, “Un'interpretazione strutturale di Inf. XXXIII 75 nel primo Ottocento (Giovanni Carmignani, 1826),” Rivista di Studi Danteschi, 1 (2001), pp. 128-46.

For another possible source of Ugolino's narrative and, in particular, its final verse, see Andreas Heil (“Ugolino und Andromache: Ein Senecazitat bei Dante?” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 75 [2000], pp. 57-65), arguing for a series of references to elements in the scene between Andromache and Ulysses, in Seneca's tragedy Troades, especially Ulysses' speech, lines 578-587, concerning Andromache's grief-filled concern for her (and Hector's) son Astyanax. Line 581, 'necessitas plus posse quam pietas solet' (necessity tends to have more power than filial love), surely sounds close to Dante's 'Poscia, più che 'l dolor, poté 'l digiuno' (Then fasting had more power than grief). Heil is aware of the problem that we have no sure knowledge of Dante's reading in the tragedies of Seneca. He admits that he may have known passages from Seneca from various florilegia, but also suggests that the closeness to Seneca's words in this scene may point to a first-hand knowledge of the Troades.

His tale told, Ugolino resumes his bestial rage against the cause of his woes, the skull of Ruggieri, whose evil plots bested Ugolino's own machinations. For the view that Ugolino hides his own culpability behind that of others, see Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, “L'orazione del conte Ugolino,” in L'artificio dell'eternità (Verona: Fiorini, 1972), pp. 283-332.

Romantic readers, who admire Ugolino, do not often read past verse 75 with close attention. Dante's apostrophe of Pisa, 'new Thebes,' blames the city, not for killing Ugolino, which it had a reason to do (if not perhaps a correct one), but for killing the children. All of Dante's sympathy is lodged with the children, none with Ugolino. And here we are not speaking of the protagonist (who was firm enough himself against Ugolino's entreaties for pity), but of the author.

In De vulgari eloquentia I.viii.2-5 Dante had divided Europeans into three large linguistic groups, Provençal, French, and Italian, by their respective ways of saying 'yes,' oc, oïl, and sì. He thus, at vv. 79-80, refers to the inhabitants of Italy.

Capraia and Gorgona are islands in the Mediterranean that then belonged to Pisa.

The transition to Ptolomea is as abrupt as that to Antenora had been (Inf. XXXII.70). And once again the determining detail is the positioning of the faces of those punished in the area. These now have their faces turned upwards (where those in Antenora looked straight ahead and those in Caïna had their faces tilted downward).

Most commentators believe that Ptolomea, where treachery to guests and friends is punished, gets its name from Ptolemy, the captain of Jericho who, as recorded in (I Maccabees 16:11-17), invited his father-in-law, Simon Maccabeus, and his two sons to a banquet and then, once they had drunk, slew them. (There is dispute about the matter, some proposing Ptolemy XII, king of Egypt, 51-47 B.C., who murdered Pompey as a favor to Julius Caesar [Phars. VIII.536-712].)

Their upturned visages turn the eye-sockets into cups in which the tears of the sinners become small basins of ice. Fra Alberigo will three times ask Dante to clear these for him (Inf. XXXIII.112-114, 127-128, 148-150).

Despite his frozen facial skin, Dante feels a wind, and asks Virgil how this can be, since the sun, creator of wind, is absent from this place.

Pietro di Dante (Pietro1, xomm. to vv. 100-108) suggests that the wind spirating from Satan, to which Virgil alludes gingerly, not wanting to alarm Dante unduly (compare his behavior as they approached the giants in Inf. XXXI.29-33), is a perverse imitation of the breath of the Holy Spirit referred to in Acts 2:3.

The only speaking presence in Ptolomea (identified as Fra Alberigo in verse 118) believes that Dante and Virgil are sinners destined for Judecca, the 'lowest station' in Inferno. In Antenora the souls seemed to be able to tell that Dante was alive; here, perhaps because of their greater physical discomfort and ice-bound blindness, their sensory capacities seem more limited than those of the souls above them.

Dante's 'agreement' with Alberigo is utterly cynical; he has no intention of helping this sinner in any way, and says what he says only to get the sinner to disclose himself, swearing a misleading oath in order to reassure him (of course he is going to the 'bottom of the ice,' but not as a sinner for his eternal punishment, but as a very privileged visitor).

A member of the Jovial Friars (see the note to Inf. XXIII.103), Alberigo was was a Guelph from Faenza, and, in 1285, invited two of his relatives, with one of whom he had had a dispute, to dinner. When he called out for the fruit course, the pre-arranged signal, hired assassins rushed into the room and killed his guests. Now, he says, he is having a fruit course of his own, in which he is getting more (and worse) than he gave, date for fig (since, in Dante's day, dates were more expensive than figs).

Here, in answer to the protagonist's question, based in his surprise at finding him here, since he had not heard that he had died, Alberigo reveals the poet's extraordinary innovation. Those who have broken the guest laws die in their souls as soon as they do so, so that their souls go to hell, leaving their bodies alive on earth. As early as Pietro di Dante, some commentators have pointed to a possible source in John 13:27, where it is said that, shortly after Judas betrayed Jesus at the Last Supper, Satan entered into Judas.

See M. Fiorilla, “'Et descendant in infernum viventes': Inf. XXXIII, 109-57 e il Salmo 54,” L'Alighieri 27 (2006): 133-39, who, departing from Dante's similar remark in Convivio (IV.vii.10-16), finds a source for this notion (that certain souls go to Hell while their bodies live on in the world) in Psalm 54:13-16 (55.14-17).

Atropos is the third of the three Fates (Clotho spins the fabric for the skein of our lives, Lachesis lets it out from her distaff, and Atropos snips it off at our deaths).

To prove his point, Alberigo points out someone he believes Dante might know taking his 'winter vacation' here in Ptolomea, Branca d'Oria. He was a Ghibelline nobleman of Genoa who, with the help of another family member, treacherously murdered his father-in-law, Michel Zanche (see Inf. XXII.88), around 1294. Thus his soul has been down here for six years, while his body is still eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting on clothes, as Dante insists. History contrived to make Dante's fiction all the more amusing. Branca, who was born ca. 1233, lived into his nineties, only dying in 1325, thus outliving his condemner, Dante. Perhaps he had the great pleasure of reading about his 'wintering' soul as he enjoyed his life in Genoa.

For the third time Alberigo asks Dante to clear the ice from his eyes, and now Dante, having what he wanted from him, simply does not do so. There are those who argue that the protagonist here behaves more like a sinner than like a Christian, but by now we should be used to his approved form of righteous indignation. And there is no reproof for such behavior from Virgil here.

Matching the apostrophe attacking Pisa that ended the first part of the canto (vv. 79-90), this one of Genoa concludes the visit to Ptolomea, one of the shortest episodes in the Inferno.