Inferno: Canto 33 Summary & Analysis

The sinner just addressed by Dante stops eating the head for a moment (wiping his mouth grotesquely on the other spirit's hair) to talk to him. The spirit recognizes that Dante is from Florence and agrees to tell his story. He is Count Ugolino from Pisa and he is eating the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, who imprisoned him along with his sons in a tower, where they starved.

Ugolino tells Dante that he is cruel if he does not weep at his story. One morning in the tower where he was starved to death, Ugolino began gnawing at his own hands and his sons told him to eat them instead, willingly sacrificing their own bodies. Ugolino stopped biting his hands, seeing how it troubled his sons. Over time, his sons died one by one and then Ugolino says ambiguously that "famine did what sorrow could not do," (33.75). After telling his story, Ugolino sinks his teeth into the Archbishop's head again.

Dante cries out against Pisa. Although Ugolino betrayed Pisa in its disputes with other Italian cities, his children did not deserve to be punished along with him. Dante and Virgil leave Ugolino behind and Dante sees some tortured souls lying on their backs in the ice, unable to weep because their tears freeze over their faces.

Dante feels a wind and asks Virgil what is causing it. Virgil tells him that he will see for himself soon enough. One suffering soul begs Dante to pull the layer of frozen tears from his face, so that he can cry once more (even though these tears will again freeze over his face). Dante agrees to on the condition that the spirit tells him his name.

The spirit identifies himself as Friar Alberigo, who killed his own brother after inviting him to a dinner. Dante asks if Alberigo is already dead and Alberigo says he isn't, but that this region of hell called Ptolomaea (reserved for those who betray guests) can hold souls even before they have died. The bodies of these people, bereft of their souls, are then possessed by demons on earth. He points out another suffering soul to Dante: Branca d'Oria, who Dante knows to be alive.

Branca had invited his father-in-law to a banquet and killed him there. Dante is incredulous that Branca's soul could come here even before he dies. Alberigo answers that Branca's soul came here as soon as he committed the murder, arriving even before the murdered father-in-law found his own place in hell. Alberigo asks Dante to release the ice from his eyes now, but Dante refuses. Dante laments Genoa, where Branca was from, as a horrible place where one of its citizens walks around with his soul already in hell.