Sordello is the Lombard soul, the poet from Mantua whom Dante and Virgil find alone in Ante-Purgatory and who rises when he hears the name of Mantua. The embrace between him and Virgil, two men who had never met, sets off in Dante the invective against Italy, the most famous passage of the cantica.
He is three things across two cantos. In canto VI he is the patrician, haughty and disdainful, who does not answer the request for the way and rises only at the name of his land. In canto VII he is the disciple: on hearing "Io son Virgilio," he draws back, lowers his brows, returns humbly and embraces him where the lesser one clings, greeting him as the glory of the Latins. And he is the local guide of the valley of the princes and of the night, who draws a line on the ground and explains that one does not climb at night, because darkness hampers the will with its inability.
It is Sordello who leads the poets to the flowering valley and points out the seated souls, one by one, by what they did or failed to do: Rudolf, who could have healed Italy's wounds and did not, Ottacchero and his son Vincislao, and others whom tradition identifies by a trait. The rule that closes the list undoes the idea that virtue passes from father to son: human probity rarely rises again through the branches.