Ugolino is the count whom Dante finds in the ice of Antenora, in Canto XXXIII, gnawing the skull of the archbishop Ruggieri. He tells Dante, weeping, how he died of hunger with his sons in the Tower of Hunger, in Pisa, after being imprisoned through Ruggieri's doing.
The account begins with a dream: he saw Ruggieri hunting a wolf and its cubs, and lean hounds tore their flanks. On waking, he hears his sons ask for bread in their sleep and, later, he hears the door of the tower below being nailed shut. He looks at his sons' faces and does not weep, so turned to stone within; it is they who weep. When he bites his own hands in pain, the sons think it is hunger and offer themselves so that he may eat of them. In the days that follow they die one by one, and Ugolino, already blind, gropes over the bodies and calls them for two days.
The verse that closes the account, "then, more than grief, fasting could," holds two readings: hunger killed him, or hunger achieved what grief did not and he ate the bodies. The poem does not choose. Then the narrator turns against Pisa and asks that the mouth of the Arno drown the city, and says that, even if Ugolino had the reputation of a traitor, the children were innocent.
The scene is one of great pity, and it stands beside one of great harshness in the same canto: Dante refuses Friar Alberigo what he had promised and calls it courtesy.