Canto XXIX 
Eighth circle, tenth ditch- counterfeiters/falsifiers 
Still considering the inhabitants of the ninth ditch, where the sowers of discord were condemned, Dante says his eyes were reeling so much from the huge number and diverse injuries being suffered there, that he wanted to cry. Virgil questions why he would stop and stare, because he didn’t do this at the other ditches, and just think how many there would be if Dante tried to number them all in the 22 mile circumference of the ditch. But the moon was already “under our feet”, meaning it was about noon, and there was still much to see in a relatively short time. As they were moving along, Dante tells Virgil that had he paid more attention, Virgil might have allowed him to stay longer, because he had noticed a family member there. Virgil answers that he had in fact noticed him, but not to waste any time thinking about him. He, Virgil, had noticed that this family member- Geri del Bello, was pointing at Dante and making threats, but while Dante was engaged talking to Bertram dal Bornio, he left. 

Dante laments that Geri had been murdered violently, but no one had taken it upon themselves to avenge the death, which would make Geri contemptuous.  

At this point they reach the edge of the tenth ditch. Dante notes that if all the hospitals of Val di Chiana, between July and September, the Maremma, and Sardegna, all places known for malaria, were emptied out and the sick placed together in a pit, it wouldn’t be as bad as what he saw in this tenth ditch.  

As they come over the ledge and descend, Dante says the minister of the most high Lord, infallible justice, punishes the falsifiers registered there. 

Anthony Esolen, who did one of the translations I use, writes that these are the quacks, charlatans, imposters, and clever artists of bunk. In life, they needed dupes to prey on. Here they are afflicted with nauseating diseases that cause them to endlessly scratch themselves. 

Then Dante uses another simile and says that if all the people of Aegina (a Greek island, where, according to Greek mythology, pestilence destroyed the people except for one, who prayed to Jupiter, who then transformed the ants into men) who were sick from the pestilence, it wouldn’t have matched the gloom seen there in that place. Some were laying on their backs, some on their stomachs, some dragged themselves, crawling along. Dante and Virgil move through watching and listening to the afflicted, who were unable to even lift themselves up. They see two propped up against each other, and while there, they scratch so furiously at their insatiable itches, that their bodies are covered with nasty, spotted scabs, which they scrape through with their fingernails.  

Virgil asks if there are any Italians (Latins) among them, and they stop and proclaim that they themselves are Italians. Virgil then encourages Dante to ask them whatever he wants. Dante starts off saying that if they would like their memory to survive in the world, reveal who they are despite their vulgar and tedious pain.  

The first (Griffolino) says he was from Arezzo. He says he was burned at the stake by Albero of Siena, but what he was killed for is not what he is in the tenth ditch for. He had told Albero that he could fly, as a joke, and Albero, having lots of desire to fly and little in the way of common sense, tries to get him to show him how. But Griffolino knows it can’t be done and Albero is pissed about it, and had him tried for heresy, for which he was condemned. But Minos, who can’t be wrong in his assessments of the sin, damned him for alchemy. 

Dante then says: “or fu già mai gente sì vana come la sanese? Certo non la francesca sì d’assai!”. Meaning: Were there ever a people so vain/empty as the Sienese? Certainly not the French so much!“ 

I think the idea of vain is both in arrogance and empty headed, so I translated it ‘stupid’. 

Then another guy, understanding Dante, pops in with “Except: 

Stricca (unsure who this is), who knew how to temper his expenses; 

Niccolò (Salimbeni), who extravagantly used cloves, a very expensive spice, for his food. Salimbeni was one of the members of the Squanderer’s Brigade; 

Caccia d’Ascian, another of the brigade who squandered vineyards and a huge estate; 

L’Abbagliante (The Dazzling One), Bartolomeo dei Folcacchieri, of whom we know little, other than he was fined for drunkenness in a tavern in 1278. 

These four are the exceptions to the general rule of the Sienese being the vainest (stupidest) people. 

Then the speaker identifies himself as Capocchio, who faked metals through alchemy. Capocchio was burned at the stake for heresy by the Sienese in 1293, so he had a good reason to hate ’em too. 

While in life, these Sienese preyed on their foolish fellows, they probably wish now the Sienese had not been quite so foolish to have fallen for their quackery, now abundantly punished. 

Canto XXX 
Eighth circle, tenth ditch- counterfeiters/falsifiers ; cont. 
Dante leads again with several similes. The first tells of when the goddess Juno (wife and sister of Jupiter) was jealous and angry with Semele, a princess of Thebes, and one of Jupiter’s lovers. She caused King Athamas’ consort, Ino, Semele’s sister, to go insane. In his insanity, he kills his son Learco by dashing him against a rock. When Ino sees this, she jumps off a cliff into the sea while holding the other son.  

The second is after the destruction of Troy, Hecuba, the widowed queen is taken captive. Her daughter Polyxena is sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles, and then as she wanders to the seashore, she finds her son Polydorus washed up, having been murdered by the king of Thrace. She then goes crazy and begins to bark and howl like a dog. 

But Dante says that the furies, neither in Thebes, nor Troy, were ever so cruel as two he saw racing around the tenth ditch, biting whatever they could reach, like a pig let loose from the pig stye. 

One reached Capocchio, and bit into the back of his neck, dragging him away and scrapping his stomach along the hard ground. 

Dante asks who these two were, and he is told by Griffolino that the first is Gianni Schicchi. Schicchi was from the Cavalcanti family in Florence. When Buoso Donati had died, his nephew Simone persuaded Gianni Schicchi to impersonate the old man on his death bed, dictating a will to the benefit of Simone. Gianni’s take was a prized mare from the Donati’s stable. 

Dante is told the second is Myrrah, (From Ovid’s Metamorphoses) a legendary Levantine beauty who fell in love with her father and tricked him into sexual intercourse by disguising herself.  

At this point, the two enraged spirits take off, so Dante looks around and sees another one, who is described as being in the shape of a lute- meaning fat, but skinnier as it goes towards the head… or at least he would look like a lute if that part of the human body that forks- the legs- were cut off. The spirit here looks like one who suffers from dropsy, or edema; the disease where fluid builds up in the body and distorts it. 

The tenth ditch holds four different types of falsifiers, each with different types of affliction:  

The alchemists in the previous canto were punished with itching scabs; the impersonators here with hydrophobia, the counterfeiters with dropsy, and the perjurers with fever. 

Master Adamo sees Dante and Virgil traveling along and tells them, who travel through this wretched level without punishment, to listen to his story. He relates that while alive, he had whatever he wanted, but here, he is so parched that he longs for even a drop of water. Part of his punishment is that he can’t escape the image of the cool waters of his native Florence, which dries him up even more. 

He was in the employ of the Count of Romena, when they convinced him to counterfeit Florins by degrading the Florin from 24 carat to 21 carat gold. Thus he “falsified the alloy sealed by the Baptist”; John the Baptist was adopted as a symbol of the city of Florence, and was burned at the stake for this in 1281. 

He says he would give up a look at the Branda fountain, a famous spring in Siena that would certainly quench his thirst, if he could only see Guido, Alessandro, or any of their brothers, here in hell with him. And, if he could trust anyone of the raving lunatics in the ditch, one of them is in fact already there. But what would it be worth to him, since he can’t move? He swears that if he could crawl even an inch in a hundred years, he’d already have set out to look for the guy among the disgusting mass, despite the entire ditch being eleven miles long, and at least half a mile across. It was because of those brothers that he has now become part of the “family” stuck together in the tenth ditch.  

Dante then asks who the two souls are who are steaming next to him, as if they were wet hands in winter. 

Adamo says they were here when he first rained down and they haven’t ever moved, nor does he think they ever will. One is Potipher’s wife, who falsely accused Joseph, and the other was Sinon, from Troy. They burn from a high fever which gives off a nasty steaming stench. 

Then Sinon gets pissed that he is being so darkly named, punches Adamo in the stomach, which sounds like a drum. This starts an amusing back and forth- an example of “tenzone”, where dueling poets would respond to each other leading off with something from what the other previously said. Dante, our poet supreme, has to show himself capable in all poetry’s various formats, I guess. 

Adamo responds by punching Sinon in the face, and telling him: even if movement has been taken away from me since I weigh so much, I still have an arm available for such tasks. 

Sinon says: your arms weren’t so available when you were sent to the stake to burn, but it seems they were pretty available for counterfeiting coins. 

Adamo says: You spoke the truth there. Too bad you didn’t tell the truth when the Trojans requested it. (Sinon was part of a conspiracy by Ulysses with the Trojan horse, to infiltrate the city. Sinon lets himself be captured, then advises the Trojans to take the horse in, the Trojans accepting his advice because Sinon has lied that Ulysses would sacrifice him to the gods in order to win the war.) 

Sinon replies: Sure I lied, and you counterfeited money. I’m here for one sin, while you’ve outdone ever demon in hell. 

Adamo: Hey perjurer, remember the horse and be pained that the whole world knows about your sin! 

Sinon: and you be pained that thirst dries out and cracks your tongue and rotten liquid puddles in your guts right before your eyes! 

Adamo: I hope your mouth is ripped to shreds by your disease, so that, if I’m thirsty and bloated, you’ll have a burning thirst and your head aches and it would take only a few words for you to be jump at the chance to lick the pond of Narcissus! 

While I’ve not gotten to Purgatorio in Italian yet, I’ve heard that this theme of Narcissus will come up again there, which would seem to say that this is a more important element than you’d be led to believe by the reference here. 

Dante says he was so engrossed listening to them when all of the sudden Virgil angrily butts in and says: Keep watching this and before long I’ll be in a fight with YOU! 

At this, Dante is so ashamed of himself that even now, it makes his head spin just to think about it. He gives another simile: you know when your dreaming, and you dream of something bad happening to you, so you think, ‘I hope this is all just a dream’…. So that you wish it wasn’t what was happening… well, in the same way, Dante says he wanted to apologize, and he did, but it didn’t seem like enough. But Virgil tells him “Less repentance has washed away even greater sins than yours, so let it go. But…. if it happens that fate puts you again where two people are arguing the same way, know that desiring to listen to that is a base desire. 

Canto XXXI 
Eighth Circle- edge of Ninth Circle 
Dante leads off with two terzinas letting us know “The same tongue that first bit me, so that both my cheeks reddened in shame”; speaking of Virgil chewing him out for being so engrossed in the base insults in the last canto; “….then applied medicine to me; as I had heard the spear of Achilles and his father would be the cause first, of pain, and then, healing”. Apparently, the “lance of Achilles” was supposed to have the property of being able to heal, with a second touch, the wound it had caused with the first. So Dante uses it as a simile for the way Virgil had at first wounded him, then healed him with words of encouragement. 

So they are up out of the tenth ditch and it looks like something neither day nor night, but with a thick dark air that Dante can’t really see through. He hears a loud blast from a horn though, which he follows back, since it seems like it came from behind him. He gives another simile that Roland, from the French epic poem “Le Chanson de Roland”, who blew his horn so hard that his veins burst and he died, did not blow his horn so terribly at the rout suffered by Charles the Great in his holy war to defeat the Saracens. 

Then Dante begins to see a bunch of tall towers, but when he asks Virgil what land this is, Virgil tells him he is getting too far ahead of himself with his imagination, and that he would soon see how the distance tricks the senses. Then Virgil decides to forewarn Dante that these aren’t, in fact, towers at all, but giants, who are stuck from the waist down in the ground. 

Dante mentions that the giants buried remind him of the Montereggioni fortress in the province of Siena, which is encircled by a high wall with a ‘crown’ of towers surrounding it. 

Dante says of them that Nature did well to quit making such living beings, or else they might have been drafted by Mars, the god of war, for his purposes. Then he notes that while Nature didn’t turn from making large creatures, like elephants and whales, but did so much more discreetly with those than the titans, since when one adds reason of the mind to ill will AND power, humans would find no safe haven. 

Dante then says the head of the giant they had come upon was about the size of the pine cone at Saint Peters in Rome, which, I humbly add, I’ve been to see, and is about 13 feet tall. The bones of the giant, were in proportion to the head. I translated it as the limbs of the giant. The giants were buried up to the waist, and the poem mentions, somewhat cryptically, that three “Frisians” could not have lived up to the task had they boasted about being able to reach it. So apparently the frisians were known as being among the tallest men in Europe. So if they were to stand end to end, they still wouldn’t have quite reached to the hairline. Dante says it was around ‘thirty large palms”, which one commentary estimated would be around 22 feet tall. Add the 13 feet of the head and you have around 35 feet tall… and that’s only half of the giant. So maybe 70 feet tall in total.  

The giant turns out to be the biblical hunter Nimrod, who founded the country of ‘Shinar’, where the tower of Babel was built. 

Nimrod blurts out some gibberish- “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi”, that sort of sounds vaguely Hebrew, but isn’t. Apparently lots of people through the ages have tried to make some sense of this, but the text below would make it clear that it isn’t meant to be understood by us. Virgil says outright that no one can understand Nimrod’s language and Nimrod can’t understand any other, so no time should be wasted in trying to communicate with him.  

They move on and meet another giant, Ephialtes, one of the titans. Dante wants to meet the “immeasurable” Briareus, but Virgil says he’s too far away. But, they are going to Antaeus, who can speak and is unchained. Ephialtes shakes himself at that point and the ground shakes stronger than any earthquake Dante could remember, which causes Dante to fear for his life, with only the chains that bind Ephialtes keeping Dante from complete dread. 

Virgil and Dante then approach Antaeus, and Virgil tells him to set them both down onto the floor of the ninth circle, with the incentive that Dante is still alive, and can tell of Antaeus when he returns to the land of the living. Then he tells Antaeus not to make them seek out Tityus or Typhon. At this, Antaeus extends his hand for Virgil, who holds Dante so tight that they are bound together. 

Dante gives another simile for what it felt like when Antaeus was reaching over him: Like one standing under the leaning side of Garisenda tower (in Bologna), and a cloud passes over it, it gives the impression of the tower actually leaning over you, and so Dante felt like this, and wished that there were some other way down, but it was all over quickly and Antaeus set them down on the bottom, where we are told Lucifer and Judas are devoured. 

Canto XXXII 
Ninth Circle- Caino; traitors- betrayers of kin 
Dante again leads off with a disclaimer that he doesn’t really have the ability to describe what is seen in this level. He says it’s not something to be taken lightly when trying to describe the “fondo”, the bottom, or what I called the basement, of the universe, nor is it fit for children, those who would call out for mommy or daddy.  

As Dante is looking up at the high wall surrounding the pit, he hears someone say: watch where you step: tread so that you don’t kick the heads of these tired, miserable brothers with your soles. Dante then looks down and sees spirits buried up to their heads in ice so clear it looks more like glass than water. He says that even on the Danube in Austria during winter, nor on the Don river (in Russia) under the frozen sky would have such thick ice as was here. He mentions that if mount Tambernic (possibly a mountain in Slovenia) and mount Pietrapan (in Tuscany) had both fallen on this ice, it wouldn’t have made even the edge creak. Basically…. really thick ice. Ok.  

Then Dante gives a simile: like frogs, when they croak with just their noses out of the water, in that season of the year when the peasant girls dream of gleaning (summer), so in this same way, the agonized spirits were there in the ice, up to where their shame appears (the face), “putting the teeth in note of stork”… is how it reads literally, but it means chattering like a storks bill would. Each of them had their faces downward, and the testimony to the cold was given by their mouths , with the chattering teeth, and testimony to their sad hearts was given by their eyes. 

Dante looks down and sees two spirits so tightly pressed against each other that their hair mixed together. He asks who they are and one responds, “why are you staring so hard at us?”. This one, we find a bit later, is Camiscion de’ Pazzi. The two he asks about are Napoleone (a Guelph) and Alessandro (a Ghibelline) degli Alberti, counts of Mangona.  

Camiscion says they came out of one body, in other words, they were born of the same mother, and you could search all of Caino and not find anyone more worthy of being set in this ‘gelatin’, a euphemism for the ice. Caino is the name of the region they are in, and it’s for those that betrayed family, named for the biblical Cain, who killed his brother Abel in a fit of anger of God’s rejection of his sacrifice.  

When Camiscion mentions that Dante could find no one more worthy of imprisonment there, he also adds others that are there: 

He whose chest and shadow were broken by one stroke from Arthur’s hand- Mordred; 

Focaccia- nickname of Vanni de’ Cancellieri, a white Guelph from Pistoia, who killed one of his own family; 

Sassol Mascheroni- the one who blocks Camiscion’s view from seeing any further- a Florentine who murdered his cousin to gain an inheritance. 

Camiscion himself murdered his in-law, Ubertino de’ Pazzi to gain control of several fortresses. 

He says he is still awaiting Carlino, ’che mi scagioni‘… the verb scagionare means to demonstrate that someone is not culpable for what he has been blamed. But clearly, Camiscion IS guilty, or else God wouldn’t have put him in the lowest region of hell. What Camiscion seems to mean here is that Carlino’s guilt is so much more, that Camiscion would look like an innocent in comparison.  

Dante then looks around and sees a thousand more of the faces looking dog like because of the cold. He says it brought a shudder on him, and even today, seeing a frozen body of water brings the same reaction.  

As the continued traveling towards the center where every heaviness is gathered, Dante shivers in the eternal shadowy chill. 

Ninth Circle- Antenora- betrayers of country 
Then Dante meets the second person he talks with. Dante leaves it undefined whether this was on purpose or not, because he says he doesn’t know whether it was “will, fortune, or destiny” that he should have gotten a good kick in on this guy. The guy himself responds testily, which, I suppose I would too if kicked in the head, with “what’d you kick me for? Unless you’ve come to increase the revenge for what I did at Montaperti, why harass me?” So this is Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed the Guelphs during the battle at Montaperti. He pretended to be a Guelph, but in a crucial moment, chopped off the arm of the standard bearer, so that the standard fell, which led to chaos on the Guelph side and ended in a rout by the Ghibellines. 

Dante asks Virgil to hold up a moment so Dante can clear up some questions he has, then he interrupts Bocca’s swearing to ask who he is that rebukes others in this way? 

Bocca responds with: “who are YOU who goes through Antenora (the section of the betrayers of country) kicking others in the face, which, even if he were alive, would be exaggerated?” 

Dante says he IS alive, and if Bocca wants to be recognized in what Dante would write, he would do well to name himself. Bocca says he wants the exact opposite, so get out and don’t give him any more sass, ’cause he (Dante) has no idea how to flatter people at this level. 

Dante has had enough and grabs a hunk of Bocca’s hair, and threatens him with: you’d best tell me what I want to know or I’ll rip your hair out! Bocca says to go ahead, even if you rip all his hair out, he’s not gonna give Dante his name, or anything else of use.  

At this point, Dante starts tearing chunks of hair out and Bocca howls in pain. 

So a neighbor screams: “What the hell, Bocca? Isn’t it enough that you’ve been yapping your jaws, and now you’re gonna howl too? What the devil has gotten into you? 

The guy, Buoso da Duera, gives up Bocca’s name to Dante, so Dante leaves off ripping out more hair and swears he’ll tell the story of Bocca’s disgrace up in the world. 

At this, Bocca gives up the other guy, by saying, Fine, write whatever you want, but when you do get out of here, don’t forget to mention Buoso da Duera, here because he sold out the Ghibellines, when he was commissioned to raise an army to oppose Charles of Anjou, but instead, took the money and let the French pass through.  

Then Bocca gives up a few more names: Tesauro dei Beccheria, who was beheaded for working to return exiles to Florence; 

Gianni de’ Soldanier, a Florentine Ghibelline who defected to the Guelphs; 

Ganelon was the traitor who plotted with the Saracens to have Roland ambushed at Roncesvalles; 

Tebaldello Zambrasi, a Ghibelline who turned traitor to Faenza because it’s leaders had played a prank on him, so he opened the gates at night to allow Bolognese Guelphs to enter. 

Dante and Virgil move on and see two spirits sunk together so that one was gnawing on the other’s head, possibly referencing the Bible where it says the leaders “devour my people as they eat bread” (Psalms 14:4) Dante stops to ask him why he would do such a bestial thing, promising that if the shade can convince him of a good cause for it, he would write it. 

Here the canto ends. 

Canto XXXIII 
Ninth Circle- Antenora- betrayers of country: cont. 
The guy we had been introduced to at the end of the last canto, who was gnawing on someone else’s head, stops what he is doing in response to Dante’s question, and takes time to tell his tale. The only reason he agrees to it is “if my words will be the seed that bears the fruit of infamy to this traitor I gnaw”. He announces himself as Count Ugolina della Gherardesca, and his victim is Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, the Archbishop of Pisa. Ghibelline Pisa was besieged by several powerful Guelph cities, and chose the Guelph Ugolino as their leader, hoping he could secure a peace. He ceded several of Pisa’s castles to the Guelphs, maybe from diplomatic prudence or necessity, when he was challenged by his Grandson Nino Visconti. Eventually, the two came to a truce, and Ugolino tried to shore his political power up by striking a deal with the Archbishop, and three families: the Gualandi, Sismondi, and Lanfranchi. They expelled Nino, and Ugolino retired to the country to wait for Nino’s banishment. 

Ruggieri was made the leader, and recalled Ugolino, but when Ugolino noted his own treachery had put Ruggieri on the throne, he came with an army, was defeated, and subsequently imprisoned, where we pick up his story. 

He says he was imprisoned in the Muda. Muda means ‘moult’… like when birds lose feathers, probably because it was high up and that’s where the birds would go.  

Ugolino has a dream where the Archbishop appeared as master and lord, and hunted the wolf and it’s cubs (he and his family) into the hills between Pisa and Lucca. “With lean, trained, and eager dogs, the Gualandi, Sismondi, and Lanfranchi families, Ruggieri set himself at the head of the hunt. In short time, the father wolf and his cubs were exhausted, caught, and torn to shreds. 

Ugolino awakes in prison, aware that the dream was an insight into his own plight. He was locked in the tower with his 4 sons until they one by one starved. After they were dead, Ugolino says he ate them to stay alive. Ugolino’s details makes it sound like they were little children, but clearly, they had to have been grown, since he had a grandson, for which his betrayal for political purposes has landed him down here in hell.  

This telling of the story effectively met Dante’s parameters for mention in the divine comedy, so he includes the story, not with sympathy for Ugolino, but for his sons, who had not deserved the punishment as did the father. 

Dante writes an invective against Pisa by calling the town a vile disgrace to the people of the beautiful land where “Si” is uttered. By this he means Italy, not Pisa and its surroundings… because he immediately says that since Pisa’s neighbors would do nothing against their vile behavior, he wished the islands of Capraia and Gorgona, two islands a bit off the coast, would move, stop up the mouth of the Arno river, which runs through Pisa, and drown the entire region.  

Ninth Circle- Ptolomea- betrayers of guests/friends 
In the first section, Caina, those imprisoned in the ice look down. In the second, Antenora, they look forward. In this section, they face up, which causes their tears to flood their eye sockets and freeze over, forming a hardened glass visor over their eyes. Dante also notices a wind, which he can’t understand where it would come from. Virgil tells him he’ll see the cause soon enough. 

One cries out asking Dante to break the frozen tears from his eyes temporarily and he would tell his tale. Dante promises him that he’ll do so, and if not, he would go to the bottom.  Dante is, of course, playing a trick on the him, since he has no intention of granting this guy any favors. The trick is that the guy thinks Dante is promising he’ll allow himself to be sentenced to an even worse punishment if he doesn’t grant his wish, while Dante knows he is traveling to the lowest level as a temporary visitor anyway, so he can accurately state that he’ll go to the bottom if he doesn’t do what he promised, with no actual harm to himself. Fitting for someone who is in hell for betrayal.  

The soul says he is Frate Alberigo, who “gave fruit in that cursed garden, so that here, I get a date for a fig.” He was a Guelph of Faenza, who had invited several relatives, with whom he had carried a bitter feud, to dinner. He called for fruit to brought out, which was the signal for assassins to come in and murder the guests. Getting “a date for a fig” has been interpreted as, since dates where more expensive than figs, he was getting back more than he paid out; or receiving a worse punishment than what he used against others. 

One of the video series I watched on the Comedy is by an Italian who says this betrayal was so famous in Italy, that it spawned a saying: ricevere “il frutto di Frate Alberigo“, to get ‘the fruit of Fra Alberigo’, which meant- I’ve been betrayed. 

The interesting part of the discussion is that after this, Dante says, wait, you’re already dead? To which Alberigo says he doesn’t know what is happening with his body up in the world, since for those in Ptolomea, the soul falls here “innanzi Atropòs mossa la dea”; “before Atropos (the mythological Fate who cuts the threads of individual human’s lives) sets it (the soul) in motion”… so before the person dies. He explains that as soon as the betrayal takes place, the soul is sent to hell, and a demon takes over the body, governing things as if the man were still alive, until the body dies. He mentions another such soul nearby, Branca Doria, whose soul had already been down in hell for many years.  

Dante says he doesn’t believe this, at which point Alberigo references the shade in the ditch where the Malebranche demons tortured them in boiling tar, Michele Zanche, and says that this one here, Branca Doria, had him killed and left a demon in his body. Then Alberigo tells Dante to fulfill his part of the bargain and clear the hardened tears from his eyes. But Dante betrays him in a just recompense calling it a courtesy to Alberigo to act the villain towards him. 

Then he inveighs against Genova, calling them alien to every morality and full of every defect, and wondering why they hadn’t just been scattered over the earth, rather than being allowed to congregate in one place. He continues that he found a Genovese, Doria, who had already been sent to hell to be locked in the icy Cocytus river, and yet his body is inhabited above by a demon. 

Here the canto ends. 

Canto XXXIV 
Ninth Circle- Judecca- betrayers of benefactors 
Virgil declares the standards of hell are advancing towards them, to start the canto. At this point, Dante can make out what seem, from the distance, to be structures like windmills, and, because there is no other shelter there, shields himself from the cold wind by hiding behind Virgil. Here the condemned souls are buried completely in ice: some lying down, others erect, both head up, and head down, and others bent over like a bow.  

Virgil stops Dante to tell him that they have reached the center, Dis.  

Dante says, again, that he doesn’t have the words to really render the scene. He was somewhere between dead and alive as he came upon Satan. Satan is sticking out of the ice from his chest. He is so huge, that Dante was closer to the giants, who were around 70 feet tall, than the giants would be to Satan. Satan is brutally ugly now, with three faces: the front is red, the right is yellowish white, and the left is black. Below each face is a set of wings that flap, creating the wind that freezes the ninth circle.  

Each mouth contains a sinner: Judas Iscariot is the prime, who is chewed head first, and has his skin scraped bare. The others are Brutus and Cassius. 

Then, as quickly as that, Virgil says: Well, we’ve seen everything so let’s get out of here. Dante holds on to Virgil’s neck, Virgil climbs onto Satan’s hairy side, and starts making his way down Satan’s body, until at one point, he turns and then seems to start climbing again. He’s exhausted, so as they go up, he pushes Dante through an opening in the rock onto a ledge, then climbs up and sits down next to him for second.  

Dante looks and, expecting to see Lucifer as he had, is disconcerted to find that what he sees is a pair of huge legs sticking up in the air. Virgil tells him to get up ’cause they have a long road ahead. Dante stops him and asks him to clear up some confusion. He asks what happened to the ice, why they are now looking at Satan’s legs, and why it went from evening to morning? Virgil tells him they’ve passed to the other side of the center of the earth. So now, they’re standing on the other side of the small sphere that makes up Judecca, and under the land, including the particular hill, where Jesus was crucified.  

Then he gives a somewhat confusing account of how Satan was tossed from heaven on the opposite, or southern, hemisphere, causing the land that used to stick up on the southern hemisphere, to cave in and be filled with water, and the same land to be displaced higher in the northern hemisphere, creating the land there. 

Within this cavern system created by Satan’s downfall, a stream has made a whole in the rock, with a relatively gentle slope. The cavern is unlit, but they can trace the stream by its sound. They make their way up without resting and exit to see the stars once again, and here the canto… and first poem, end.