1–36. The multitude … compassionate toward him: The first part of the canto continues the theme of the sowers of discord (bolgia 9); the emphasis on the multitude and on the pilgrim’s hallucinated fixation on the wounds recalls the opening of the previous canto.
1–3. The multitude … stay and weep: For drunkenness with the spectacle of blood, see Augustine’s account of Alypius at the gladiatorial contests in Confessions 6.8:
For when he saw that blood, he drank cruelty in with it and did not turn away, but he fixed his sight on it and drank in fury unaware and he took pleasure in the wickedness of the spectacle and became drunk [inebriabatur] with pleasure in blood.
The pilgrim’s attitude is more ambiguous, but it still involves some degree of participation in the sin of the bolgia.
9. the valley turns for twenty-two miles: That is, its circumference is twenty-two miles. Dante clearly has in mind the well-known fact that the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle (pi) is 22:7; this means, of course, that the diameter of this bolgia is seven miles. In the sixteenth century, there were several attempts to calculate the exact dimensions of all of Hell on the basis of this indication. For the association of the number eleven with sin, see the note to 11.16– 111.
10–11. already the moon … granted us: Since the moon is two days past full (20.127), the time in Jerusalem is early afternoon on Saturday. Virgil’s reference to a limit on the time granted them seems a clear reference to the widespread folk tradition that visits to the other world must be completed within twenty-four hours (the journey began at nightfall on Friday; 2.1): only four or five hours, then, remain (but see 34.96, with note). In figural terms, of course, the arrival on the shore of the mountain of Purgatory must take place on Easter morning.
13–21. If you had attended … costs so much down there: The pilgrim claims that he was lingering in order to catch sight of one of his relatives (Virgil identifies this relative in line 27). These lines are not inconsistent with lines 1–3; rather, they identify his desire to see his relative as itself part of the addiction to bloody spectacle.
20. of my blood: It is partly the sense of the closeness, the materiality even, of the blood tie that explains the duty of exacting vengeance for the spilling of it (lines 32–33).
22. Let not your thought break over him: The metaphor has been variously explained; we interpret it as comparing Dante’s relative to a rock projecting for the moment above the waves of the sea (cf. 20.3: “this first canticle, which is of those submerged“; the imagery of voyage and shipwreck has permeated the Inferno). Let him sink, Virgil is saying.
25–27. I saw him … Geri del Bello: The threatening gesture is presumably a stabbing motion. Dante’s sons Jacopo and Pietro in their commentaries identify Geri del Bello, well known as an instigator of violence, as a second cousin of Dante’s on his father’s side; the date of his death is unknown but apparently later than 1280. Benvenuto says that the Alighieri took vengeance on Geri’s killer, a member of the Sacchetti family, in 1310; Pietro Alighieri says that the families were formally reconciled in 1342. (There are detailed articles on what is known of Dante’s relatives in E.D.)
29. Hautefort: Hautefort was Bertran de Bom’s castle (see the note to 28.134).
31–36. his violent death … compassionate toward him: The obligation of private vengeance was recognized by law in the Italian communes; vengeance was punished—in theory at least—only if it was judged excessive. Dante’s position on the matter is complex: the pilgrim feels the shame of the affront (line 33) and seems to acknowledge that Geri’s resentment at being unavenged is justified. At the same time, vengeance is reserved to God by the Old and New Testaments (Deut. 32.35: “Revenge is mine,“ quoted in Romans 12.19) and was in Dante’s time a major political problem resulting from the breakdown of central authority (the empire). The temptation to avenge Geri is closely related to the sin of the bolgia (cf. Mosca, 28.103–11: the ruinous feud between the Amidei and the Buondelmonti, to which Dante traced all the disasters of recent Florentine history, originated in the desire for revenge).
40–45. When we were above … with my hands: Sounds from the new bolgia are said to strike the pilgrim’s ears only when he reaches the point where it is fully revealed to sight, a touch characteristic of Dante’s tendency to establish sharp boundaries between the parts of the other world (cf. a similar transition in 3.21–22).
40, 41. cloister, converts: Sarcastic monastic imagery, as in 23.90–91, but see the note on hospitals (lines 47–48).
43–44. strange lamentings … made of pity: The idea that the lamentings pierce the pilgrim with pity occasions the metaphor of their being arrows whose sharp iron points are made of pity.
46–69. What the suffering … down the evil road: The last bolgia is introduced in a manner closely parallel to the previous one (28.1–12): there the slaughter of the countless battles afflicting southern Italy, here the malaria prevalent in the marshy parts of Italy (even in the twentieth century: the Pontine marshes south of Rome and parts of the Maremma were drained only under Mussolini). Both panoramas are versions of the social consequences of fraud, the evils of the body politic. See Additional Note 13.
47–48. hospitals of Valdichiana … Maremma … Sardinia: These are all regions where malaria was particularly virulent: the Valdichiana (valley of the river Chiana, a tributary of the Arno) is in southeastern Tuscany, between Arezzo and Chiusi; the Maremma is in southwestern Tuscany. The establishment of hospitals for malaria victims was the mission of several religious orders.
57. the falsifiers that it registers here: “The falsifiers” announces the sin punished in this bolgia, of which, it will turn out, there are several distinct categories (hence, perhaps, the registry). Most commentators take the phrase “that it registers here” as a reference to the books in which good and bad deeds are recorded by the angels, to be read out at the Last Judgment (Apoc. 20.12), referred to also in Par. 19.112–13; they take “here” to mean “in this life.”
58–66. I do not believe … different heaps: The reference is to Ovid’s retelling of the myth in Met. 7.523–660: Aegina, a small island near Athens, was depopulated by a plague caused by Juno’s anger; its king, Aeacus, begged Jupiter for help and in a dream saw the ants becoming men; his new followers appear in a manner that recalls his dream (it should be noted that Ovid’s “assertion” of the myth is unusually guarded). In Convivio 4.27.17, Dante approvingly cites Aeacus for his appeal to God but does not mention the ants.
In Ovid’s account, the plague occurs when dark clouds, hot weather, and south winds infect the springs and the lakes (533); it attacks first animals (536), and then men (552), the latter especially through the odor of the dead animals (548, 551); Dante refers only to the malignity of the air (line 60), sharpening the parallel with malaria. Ovid’s description offers a number of suggestions for the heaping and indiscriminate scattering of bodies (especially lines 559–60, 570–71, 574, and 581); Dante’s touch of the tiny worm dying is not in Ovid (and would seem inconsistent with the survival of the ants), though Dante may have considered it implied in the deaths of the large animals (537–81).
66. heaps: The Italian is biche, properly used of the heaped sheaves of harvested grain waiting to be stored (the harvest is implicitly a reference to the Last Judgment).
68–69. this one crawling transmuted himself: Carpone [on all fours] echoes 25.140–41, on the crawling of the new lizard. The striking “transmuted himself” (si trasmutava) for “transferred himself” is an anticipation of the theme of alchemy, which pretended to transmute lesser metals into gold, as well as an echo of the grotesque transmutations of the bolgia of the thieves.
73–84. I saw two … larger scales: The early commentators identified the disease from which the two are suffering as either scabies or leprosy; leprosy (in its medieval sense) seems the more likely. Bosco (E.D. 3, s.v. lebbra) cites the widely used thirteenth-century encyclopedia by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (7.64), on one type of leprosy, called “serpentine”: “it is scaly: the patient suffering from this type of leprosy easily loses the surface of his skin, which is resolved in a kind of scaliness”; Bartholomaeus also says that stench and itch are characteristic of it. Nardi (1944) suggested that the choice of this disease as the punishment for alchemists was derived from their way of considering base metals to be “diseases of gold” and lead, in particular, as the “leprosy of gold.” The frenetic activity of these two sharply distinguishes them from the others so far described.
76–78. I have never seen … stayed awake: Two examples of extreme haste, a stable boy using the currycomb on a horse while his master waited, presumably with impatience, and one currying a horse late at night when anxious to sleep.
85. O you who dismail yourself: The metaphor implicitly compares the scabs to the circles of metal of which a coat of chain mail is fashioned. But the analogy is much closer with ancient scale armor; Dante knew Vergil’s descriptions, such as Aen. 11.487–88 (of Turnus): “iamque adeo rutilum thoraca indutus aénis/ horrebat squamis …” [and already, putting on shining body-armor, he bristled with bronze scales …]. The comparison to the scales of snakes was natural and underlies the famous description of the armed Pyrrhus in Aen. 2.469–75.
109–19. I was from Arezzo … practiced in the world: The early commentators identify this alchemist as one Griffolino, burned at the stake in Siena before 1272 for heresy. Albero (or Alberto) of Siena was a nobleman whose existence is attested by documents, favored by the bishop—or the inquisitor— “one who loved him as a son,” line 117 (the early commentators take line 117 to mean that Albero was literally the son of the bishop).
116. I did not make him Daedalus: That is, I did not teach him to fly. The allusion to Daedalus, especially in a context stressing fatherly love, suggests that Griffolino is in some sense parallel to Icarus: his overweeningjoke flew too high for Albero! (Cf. the references to Icarus in 17.109–11, 26.110–11.)
119. alchemy: Alchemy, then, is the first category of falsification in this bolgia. Medieval writers distinguish permissible alchemy (the ancestor of modem chemistry)–the effort to discover the substance common to all metals and achieve their transmutation, especially of base metals into gold—from the fraudulent variety. The notoriety of fraudulent alchemy can be gauged by the many laws against it, as well as from texts like Chaucer’s “Canon Yeoman’s Prologue,” an exposé of a fraudulent alchemist by his servant. The cooking metaphors of the canto are related to the concoctions and reductions of alchemy.
121–23. Now was there ever … the French, by far: Dante also makes fun of the vanity and credulity of the Sienese in Purg. 13.151–54; Boccaccio (Trattatello) says he visited the city a number of times. The vanity of the French was proverbial.
125–32. Except for Stricca … Nicholas . .. the crew … Caccia … Bedazzled: These are notorious Sienese spendthrifts of the late thirteenth century (the theme relates this passage closely to the spendthrifts in 13.110–35). Stricca has been variously identified as a member of the prominent Salimbeni or Tolomei family. Nicholas may have been his brother; the spice clove, which had to be imported from the East, was extremely expensive in this period (“the garden where that seed takes root” is, of course, Siena; appiccarsi [literally, to adhere] is used also of two thieves in 25.61). The Italian term brigata, which we translate as “crew,” refers to the medieval Italian custom of informal groups (apparently often of about a dozen persons, and often of both sexes, especially later in the fourteenth century) who met periodically to socialize. This one was said to have been twelve rich young men of Siena who put their entire fortunes into one fund and consumed it in twenty months, partying and banqueting; among them were Caccianemico degli Scialenghi d’Asciano and Bartolommeo dei Folcacchieri, called L’Abbagliato [Bedazzled], who is known to have repeatedly served as podestà of other cities and to have died in 1300.
Note the emphasis on expensive seasonings for foods in comparison with the necessities themselves. See Additional Note 13.
133–39. But so that you … of nature: The soul, Capocchio, now identifies himself as someone the pilgrim can recognize. Benvenuto says that Capocchio was a Florentine and possessed the academic title magister; Buti and others say that he and Dante studied natural science together—if so, probably materia medica (Dante qualified for membership in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali [the Guild of Physicians and Pharmacists]). Capocchio was burned at the stake in Siena in 1293; the order for payment of his executioners is recorded in the city archives.
134. sharpen your eye: The same word (aguzzare) used, though in a slightly different sense, of the band of homosexuals in 15.20.
139. how good an ape I was of nature: How well I could imitate nature, presumably in his imitation gold and silver, but some early commentators say that Capocchio was a famous and witty mimic. The Romance of the Rose seems to be one of the earliest texts to speak of art as the “ape of nature” (the metaphor is partly derogatory, since the products of art are always inferior to those of nature). Art, says Jean de Meun (lines 15999–16001),
si garde conment Nature euvre, car mout voudroit fere autele euvre, et la contrefet conme singes.
[watches how nature operates,for it would dearly wish to make such a work,and it imitates her like an ape.]
See Curtius 1953. All the inmates of this bolgia are “apes“ in the sense of producing debased imitations.