Who He Is
Count Ugolino is the condemned man whom Dante sees at the end of Canto XXXII of the Inferno, in the ice of Antenora, two in one hole, so that the head of one is the cap of the other: the upper one gnaws the skull of the lower one as bread is eaten in hunger. At the end of the canto Dante asks him the reason for this hatred, and promises to pay in the world if the tongue he speaks with does not dry up. In Canto XXXIII of the Inferno Ugolino lifts his mouth from the savage meal, wipes it on the hair of the head he ruined, says that Dante asks him to renew a desperate grief that tightens his heart just thinking of it, and does what the poem announces, speaking and weeping at once, if the words are to be seed that brings infamy to the traitor he gnaws. He declares himself Count Ugolino and names Archbishop Ruggieri as his neighbor, and tells how he died of hunger in the Muda Tower, with his sons. What defines him is the contrast of two roles in the same body, that of traitor in the ice and that of a father who saw his sons die, and the fact that the poem alleviates neither of them.
Trajectory
In Canto XXXII of the Inferno, after hearing Bocca, Dante sees the two frozen in one hole, each gnawing the other, and compares the gesture to that of Tydeus, who gnawed the temples of Menalippus out of disdain. He asks the upper one what sustains such hatred and commits himself to pay him in the world above, knowing the other's guilt. The canto ends there. Canto XXXIII of the Inferno begins with the answer, and Ugolino tells the rest. He gives Ruggieri the title of archbishop and Dante that of Florentine, by his manner of speaking. He says there is no need to tell how, through the archbishop's evil thoughts, having trusted him, he was taken and then killed; what Dante cannot have heard is how cruel his death was. A small opening in the Muda Tower had already shown him several moons when he had the bad sleep that tore open the veil of the future for him. He saw Ruggieri, master and lord, hunting the wolf and the wolf cubs on the mountain that keeps the Pisans from seeing Lucca, with lean, eager, well-trained hounds and three families placed at the front; in a short run, father and sons seemed tired, and the sharp fangs tore at their flanks. Waking before dawn, he heard his sons who slept with him weep and ask for bread. Ugolino interrupts the account and addresses Dante: you are cruel indeed if you do not grieve; and if you do not weep, what do you ever weep over? On hearing the door of the tower nailed shut below, he looked at his sons' faces without saying a word:
Io non piangëa, sì dentro impetrai: / piangevan elli; e Anselmuccio mio / disse: “Tu guardi sì, padre! che hai?”, I did not weep, so turned to stone within; they wept; and my Anselmuccio said: "You look so, Father! What is wrong with you?"
He did not weep nor answer all that day or the following night, until the other sun rose. When a little light entered the prison and he saw his own likeness in four faces, he bit both his hands in grief, and the children, thinking it was hunger that moved him, rose suddenly and offered themselves:
ed ei, pensando ch’io ’l fessi per voglia / di manicar, di sùbito levorsi / e disser: “Padre, assai ci fia men doglia / se tu mangi di noi: tu ne vestisti / queste misere carni, e tu le spoglia, and they, thinking I did it out of desire to eat, at once rose up and said: "Father, it will hurt us far less if you eat of us: you clothed us in this wretched flesh, and now you strip it off."
He quieted himself so as not to grieve them further. They spent that day and the next in silence. On the fourth day Gaddo threw himself stretched out at his feet and died. Between the fifth day and the sixth, Ugolino saw the three fall one by one, and, already blind, spent two days groping over each of them and calling them:
già cieco, a brancolar sovra ciascuno, / e due dì li chiamai, poi che fur morti. / Poscia, più che ’l dolor, poté ’l digiuno, already blind, groping over each one, and for two days I called them after they were dead. Then, more than grief, hunger could.
When he had finished saying this, with his eyes twisted, he took up the wretched skull again with his teeth, which on the bone were as strong as a dog's.
The poet leaves the ambiguity in the text and does not resolve it. After the story, the narrator turns against the city and gives Pisa the imprecation:
Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti / del bel paese là dove ’l sì suona, / poi che i vicini a te punir son lenti, Ah, Pisa, shame of the peoples of the fair land where the sì sounds, since your neighbors are slow to punish you.
The caveat that follows is that of one who does not absolve: even if Ugolino had the reputation of having betrayed the castles, the children were innocent, a new Thebes. According to the stories of Pisa, two of the dead were his grandsons; the poem calls them all sons, and gives their names: Uguiccione, Brigata, and the other two whom the canto mentioned earlier, Anselmuccio and Gaddo.
Themes Embodied
Ugolino is Loyalty and Betrayal with both sides open: the man who is in the ice for having betrayed, according to reputation, and the father whose sons offer their own bodies. The poem does not choose between the two and softens neither, and that is why the canto is the most quoted of the bottom. Justice and Law appears in the punishment, which gives Ugolino's rancor against the archbishop the form of a common punishment, one mouth upon the other's nape. Politics is at the bottom of the story: the archbishop as lord of the hunt, the families placed at the front, and the curse against Pisa, which the poem wishes drowned in the Arno.
Ugolino does not weep when his sons weep, and the canto leaves both reasons open: perhaps so as not to teach fear, perhaps because he could no longer. The same canto that puts him in the ice for betrayal lets him recount the death of his sons without the reputation of traitor entering his narrative, and the narrator, who gives him the word, is the same one who afterward says that the children were innocent.
Divergent Readings
The verse "more than grief, hunger could" bears two readings, and the poem refuses to choose. In one, hunger overcame grief and Ugolino died of hunger after his sons. In the other, hunger achieved what grief did not, and he ate the bodies. The following scene, in which he returns to gnawing Ruggieri's skull with teeth as strong as a dog's, pushes the reader toward the second; the offer of his sons pushes back toward the first. Ugolino does not say.
Between Francesca and Ugolino the poem gives the two extremes of the pity it asks of the reader. Francesca moves and condemns at once, and the pilgrim falls in a faint. Ugolino moves and condemns at once, and the pilgrim listens in silence to the whole story; it is the narrator who, at the end, turns against Pisa.
Relationships
- Dante: the Florentine listener who asks him the reason for the hatred and who hears the story without interrupting (Canto XXXIII of the Inferno).
- Virgil: the master absent from the account, who only reappears at the end of the canto, when Dante asks him who moves the wind.
- Lucifer: the emperor of the sorrowful kingdom, at the center of the same lake of ice, whom the next canto shows.