The Inferno

by Dante

  79–81. The new prospect before Dante’s eyes, once he is over the seventh bolgia, having descended from the bridge that connects to the eighth, completely absorbs his attention. The identity of the speaker, which he has been so eager to learn, is now forgotten—for a while. [return to English / Italian]

  82–84. Now begins the drama of the marvelous, what Milton might have called “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” Many have commented upon the exuberance of Dante’s treatment of the scene of the thieves. On the question of the perhaps problematic virtuosity of this and the next canto see Terd.1973.1; for a reply see Hawk.1980.1. [return to English / Italian]

  85–87. The serpents derive, as almost all commentators duly note, from the ninth book of Lucan’s Pharsalia with its description of the Libyan desert, replete with them. They are all beyond the pale of any known zoology. For Dante’s knowledge of Lucan in general see Para.1965.2. [return to English / Italian]

  88–90. Dante adapts Lucan’s somewhat unusual term for “serpent” (pestis—which generally means “plague”) and now imagines as many deserts as he knows of containing still other improbable serpentine creatures. [return to English / Italian]

  91–96. The scene, with its principal actors naked, afraid, and trying to hide, evokes, as Hollander has argued (Holl.1983.2), p. 34, the description of Adam and Eve hiding from God in the Garden of Eden after they have sinned (Gen. 3:9–10): “Vocavitque Dominus Deus Adam, et dixit ei: ‘Ubi es?’ Qui ait, ‘Vocem tuam audivi in paradiso et timui, eo quod nudus essem, et abscondi me’ ” (And the Lord God called Adam and asked, “Where are you?” And Adam said, “I heard your voice in the garden and I grew afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself”). Hollander goes on to examine nine more moments in this scene that reflect the “primal scene” of thievery in Eden, including the parodic version of the fig leaves with which Adam and Eve covered their loins in Gen. 3:7 found here in vv. 95–96. See also Beal.1983.1, pp. 103–5, for resonances of the Edenic scene in this passage.

  The heliotrope was a stone that supposedly had the power to render its possessor invisible, as Boccaccio’s Calandrino was urged to believe by his trickster friends (Decameron VIII.3). On the heliotrope’s properties see Ciof.1937.1. [return to English / Italian]

  97. This figure, so rudely attacked, will turn out to be Vanni Fucci (v. 125). [return to English / Italian]

  98–99. For this and the two other forms of punishment found in this bolgia see the “Table of Metamorphoses,” the endnote to Canto XXV. [return to English / Italian]

  100. Since the so-called Ottimo Commento (1333), commentators have agreed that these two letters are written most quickly because they are written in a single stroke. But do these two letters signify anything? For instance, are they a code for Dante’s vaunt against Ovid (i.e., “I [io] can portray metamorphosis even better than you”)? Or do they represent the negation of Vanni’s self (i.e., “io” spelled backwards)? For an ingenious argument, extending this second hypothesis, see Darby Chapin (Darb.1971.1), suggesting an Ovidian source. She argues that, when Io was transformed into a cow (Metam. I.646–650), medieval commentators represented her new hoofprint as made of the two letters of her name, the “I” written inside the “O” so as to represent the cleft in her newly formed hooves (). [return to English / Italian]

  107–111. The reference to the phoenix is also Ovidian (Metam. XV.392–402). That rare bird was reputed to live five hundred years and then be reborn out of the ashes of its own perfumed funeral pyre. Christian exegetes thus easily took the phoenix as a symbol of Christ (see Beal.1983.1, pp. 105–7). Vanni, seen in this light, thus parodically enacts the death and resurrection of Christ. [return to English / Italian]

  119–120. The poet’s exclamation is part of his presentation of himself not as a merely ingenious teller of fantastic tales, but as the scribe of God, only recording what he actually saw of God’s just retaliation for sins performed against Him. See Romans 12:19, where Paul offers the words of God, “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay.” [return to English / Italian]

  122–126. Vanni Fucci’s laconic self-identification tells us that he was an illegitimate son (of the Lazzari family of Pistoia) and insists upon his bestiality (some early commentators report that his nickname was “Vanni the Beast”). He died sometime after 1295, when he apparently left Pistoia, and before 1300—although this is not certain. [return to English / Italian]

  127–129. Dante’s response indicates that he had once known Vanni and thought of him as guilty of sins of violence, not necessarily those of fraud. [return to English / Italian]

  132–139. Vanni’s shame and honest self-description give him a certain moral advantage over many of the dissembling sinners whom we meet. At the same time his wrathful character extends not only to self-hatred, but to hatred of others, as his ensuing harsh words for Dante will reveal (vv. 140–151). His character, so briefly etched, is that of a familiar enough figure, the embittered destroyer of any human bond.

  The theft of sacred objects from the sacristy of the chapel of St. James in Pistoia—which caused an uproar when it occurred, ca. 1293–95—was first not laid to his door and he indeed had left the city before his complicity was revealed by one of his confederates, soon afterwards put to death for his part in the crime. There is speculation that the eventual truth of Vanni’s involvement was only discovered after 1300, yet in time for Dante to present it as “news” here in his poem. [return to English / Italian]

  140–142. Vanni’s prophecy is the last of these “personal prophecies” found in Inferno. There are nine of these in the Comedy. (See note to Inf. VI.64–66.) He offers it as a form of revenge on Dante for having seen him in such distress. [return to English / Italian]

  143–150. The riddling expression of the language of prophecy is, at least for a contemporary of Vanni’s and Dante’s, for the most part not difficult to unravel. Pistoia’s White Guelphs will drive out the Black party in 1301; Florence’s Blacks will do the same in the same year to the Whites in that city (with one consequence being Dante’s exile). In 1302 the Blacks of Pistoia, allied with Moroello Malaspina (“the headlong bolt”), will have their revenge upon the Whites, taking their stronghold at Serravalle. Some understand that Vanni also (or only) refers to the eventual Black victory over the Whites in Pistoia itself in 1306. [return to English / Italian]

  151. Vanni’s acerbic ending, personalizing the prophecy as a way of making Dante grieve, is his tit-for-tat response for the grief that Dante has caused him by seeing him. He may be damned for thievery, but his party will be victorious, while Dante’s will be roundly defeated. [return to English / Italian]

  INFERNO XXV

  1–3. Emphasizing the close relationship between the two cantos, this one begins in absolute continuation of the action of the last, as though there were no formal divide between them.

  Vanni’s obscene gesture to God is variously understood. Francesco da Buti, in his gloss, says that the gesture is made by extending two fingers on each hand (apparently the same gesture as giving the sign of the horns, for cuckoldry, but the commentator does not say so), and in this case, four fingers in all, thus accounting for the verb squadrare (“to square”), with its resonance of fourness. Beginning with Pompeo Venturi in the 1730s, most commentators say that the gesture is made by placing the thumb between the index and middle fingers. Ignazio Baldelli, however, has recently argued that the gesture involves making the image of the female pudenda with thumb and index finger (Bald.1997.1). Whatever the precise gesture Vanni made, it was not a polite one. [return to English / Italian]

  4. The serpents, according to Guido da Pisa, become Dante’s “friends” because they undo the reason for the curse laid on the serpent in the Garden (Gen. 3:15); these serpents are doing something praiseworthy despite their unappealing ancestry. [return to English / Italian]

  5–9. The serpents attaching themselves to Vanni reminded Tommaseo of the serpents that kill the sons of Laocoön and eventually capture the priest hi
mself in their coils and strangle him (Aeneid II.201–224). Other commentators have not followed his lead. [return to English / Italian]

  10–12. The poet apostrophizes Pistoia as he nears the end of the section of these cantos devoted to Vanni Fucci. The next thieves whom we will see will all be Florentines. [return to English / Italian]

  13–15. Vanni’s pride is unfavorably compared even to that displayed by Capaneus (Inf. XIV.49–60). We are reminded once more that sins, in any given sinner (living or dead) are often several; Capaneus, a blasphemer, and Vanni Fucci, a thief, are both portrayed as being motivated by pride against God. [return to English / Italian]

  17–18. It is here, at last, that we find the answer to the question the text left us with in the last canto—or so Hollander (Holl.1983.2), pp. 36–37, has claimed. Verses 65–78 of the previous canto had Dante eager to discover the identity of the speaker of those unformed words and Virgil getting him closer to their source so that he could have his answer. The descent, however, allows him to see still other (very distracting) things: the serpents and then Vanni Fucci. The moment Vanni disappears we finally hear that voice and have our question answered. All commentators who have dealt with the issue have argued either that the voice was Vanni’s or that its identity was intentionally and totally masked by the author. It seems, on the other hand, that the voice is that of Cacus, the thieving centaur, who will be named at v. 25. What do we discover? He is angry (“pien di rabbia”), as was that voice (ad ira mosso, and not ad ire mosso); he cries out in perverse imitation of God’s voice in the Garden in the Bible (Gen. 3:9) asking hiding Adam, “Where are you?” (See note to Inf. XXIV.91–96.) Cacus is in pursuit of Vanni Fucci, “unripe” (acerbo) because of his sin. Later in the poem Satan is also portrayed as having fallen from heaven “unripe” (acerbo) in his sinfulness (Par. XIX.48), while Adam, beginning his life innocent, without sin, is referred to as having been created by God “ripe” (maturo) in the Garden (Par. XXVI.91). Thus, in this “replay” of the primal scene of theft in the Garden, Vanni takes on the role of Adam after the Fall, having moved from ripeness to unripeness, hiding from his just maker, while Cacus plays the unlikely role of the vengeful God in pursuit of his fallen child. [return to English / Italian]

  19–33. Cacus was strictly speaking not a centaur, but the tradition that he was one extends at least until the prologue of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Virgil does refer to him as “semihominis Caci” (half-human Cacus) at Aeneid VIII.194, but his context is clear: Cacus is the son of Vulcan, not of Ixion, father of the Centaurs. And so Dante’s decision to make him a centaur, a “brother” of the keepers of the first ring of violence in Inferno XII, is either completely his own or reflects a tradition about which we know nothing. (See G. Padoan, “Caco,” ED, vol. 1, 1970, pp. 741–42.) On the other hand, many details of this passage clearly reflect those found in the lengthy passage describing Hercules’ killing of Cacus for his theft of cattle in Virgil’s poem (VIII.184–275), dragging them into his cave backwards so that their hoofprints would lead away from the guilty party’s lair. It seems clear that Dante here had Virgil’s poem in mind as his prime source and that he knowingly distorts Virgilian text: in Virgil, Cacus is not a centaur; in Virgil his mouth gives forth smoke and fire (vv. 198–199; 252–255; 259) while in Dante he has a dragon on his back to do that for him; in Virgil, Hercules strangles Cacus (vv. 260–261) while in Dante he clubs him over the head (see Holl.1983.2, pp. 40–41). We have seen such willful rearrangement of Virgilian material before, notably in Inferno XX, and will see it again (see Inf. XXXI.103–105), when the unseen Briareus will be described in very un-Virgilian terms (see note to Inf. XXXI.97–105). As Beal points out (Beal.1983.1), pp. 108–10, Cacus was often seen as related to Satan, since Hercules was frequently understood to represent Christ.

  The Maremma is a boggy region of Tuscany, the Aventine one of the seven hills of Rome. [return to English / Italian]

  34–36. The frenetic action described in this canto is so amply described that less than 15 percent of its verses are spoken by its characters, the lowest figure for any canto in the Inferno.

  The three sinners will turn out to be Agnello (named at v. 68), Buoso (v. 140), Puccio (v. 148); Cianfa literally joins Agnello (named at v. 43); Francesco will be added, referred to indirectly (v. 151). Thus there are five Florentine thieves seen here in this bolgia. [return to English / Italian]

  43. The first of the five Florentines referred to in the canto, Cianfa, according to early commentators, was a member of the Donati family; he apparently died in 1289. [return to English / Italian]

  44–45. Dante’s digital gesture hushes Virgil. When we consider the enormous liberties the poet has just taken with the text of the Aeneid, we may not be surprised, within the fiction, at his rather peremptory treatment of his leader. [return to English / Italian]

  49–51. As we will eventually be able to puzzle out, Cianfa is the serpent attaching itself, in a parody of sexual embrace, to Agnello. See endnote to this canto for some details. [return to English / Italian]

  64–66. The third of these three rapid comparisons has caused difficulty: does the poet refer to a flame moving across a piece of parchment, turning the nearer material brown before it blackens? or to the wick of a candle, which similarly turns brown before turning black? The strongest case for the former is that, in the case of the candlewick, the brown color moves down the wick, while Dante says the brown moves suso (“up,” “along”). See Chia.1991.1, p. 746. [return to English / Italian]

  68. Agnello (or Agnolo) dei Brunelleschi, a Ghibelline family, of whom the commentators have little to say that can be relied upon as coming from history rather than from Dante’s placement of him among the thieves. [return to English / Italian]

  69–72. For the “mating” of the two thieves, twentieth-century commentators, beginning perhaps with Grandgent, point to the conjunction in a single bisexual body of Ovid’s nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Metam. IV.373–379). [return to English / Italian]

  79–81. The final coupling of the canto conjoins Buoso and Francesco in yet a third version of punishment seen in this bolgia (see the endnote to the canto). The “dog days” are the hottest part of summer in late July and early August. [return to English / Italian]

  82–90. A new figure (Francesco) assaults one of the remaining two (Agnello and Cianfa have moved off), known as Buoso, as we shall learn near the canto’s end. [return to English / Italian]

  94–102. The three rhetorically balanced tercets perform a task slightly different from the one they are traditionally accorded, i.e., the modern poet’s victorious boast over his creaky classical forebears. But that is what the first two both seem to do: let Lucan be silent with his horrible tales of soldiers slain by serpents in the Libyan desert in Book IX of the Pharsalia; let Ovid be silent with his tales of Cadmus, transmogrified into a serpent (Metam. IV.563–603), and of Arethusa, transformed into a spring (Metam. V.572–641). The third puts forward the modern poet’s superiority: Buoso and Francesco do not sustain individual transformations, but exchange their very natures, one becoming the other. Is the radical difference between Lucan/Ovid and Dante the poetic novelty of the latter, as would seem to be the case? Or is it rather the result of this poet’s not inventing his marvels, but merely describing them? We all realize that the first explanation is in fact correct, Dante does (and means to) outdo his classical precursors. But then we may reflect that his claim is that he is not making this up, but merely observing “reality,” God’s vengeance on the floor of the seventh bolgia. Let fictive poets yield to this new Christian teller of truths revealed, the humble scribe of God. We do not have to believe this claim, but we can sense that it is being lodged. [return to English / Italian]

  103–138. This, the most fully described of the various metamorphoses found in these two cantos, is broken by Castelvetro into seven stages of mutual transformation, Francesco into a man and Buoso into a serpent. The former becomes a man as follows: (1) his tail becomes legs,
(2) his front paws become arms, (3) his rear legs become a penis, (4) his hide becomes skin, (5) his posture changes from prone to erect, (6) his snout becomes a face, (7) his serpentine hiss becomes a voice. Buoso, naturally, goes through exactly the obverse process. [return to English / Italian]

  139–141. Francesco, not identified until the last verse of the canto, turns momentarily away from Buoso, having regained his power of speech, only to use it to express his desire to punish him, addressing Puccio (see v. 148). As for Buoso, his identity is much debated. Michele Barbi (Barb.1934.1), pp. 305–22, suggests that he is probably Buoso di Forese Donati (died ca. 1285). [return to English / Italian]

  144. Campi points to Landino’s and Vellutello’s understanding of this Florentine verb, abborracciare, as meaning to make something of a botch of things as a result of working too quickly. Thus Dante’s worries that his pen, following these never-before-observed and rapid transformations, may have blotted his page a bit when he attempted to set them down. [return to English / Italian]

  148. Puccio Galigai, nicknamed “Lameshanks,” of a Ghibelline family. As for the reason for his not undergoing transformation, as do the four other Florentines in this canto, Fallani, in his commentary, follows Filomusi Guelfi (Filo.1911.1), suggesting that Puccio Sciancato, the only sinner in this bolgia who is not changed in form, perhaps represents simple fraud, also treated by Aquinas in the passage referred to in the endnote that follows. [return to English / Italian]