The Tower of Hunger — Divine Comedy

The gnawer lifts his jaws, wipes them on the hair of the head he has been eating, and speaks. He is Count Ugolino; the skull beneath him is Archbishop Ruggieri, who had him imprisoned. Ugolino tells the story not to establish his innocence, the betrayal and imprisonment are known, but to show how cruel the murder was. He describes the dream: Ruggieri hunting a wolf and whelps toward the Pisan mountains with lean hounds. Then he woke before dawn and heard his sons weeping and asking for bread. The tower door was nailed shut. He went stone-still; his sons wept; little Anslem cried out, "Thou lookest so! Father, what ails thee?", and Ugolino shed no tear and answered nothing, all that day and the next night. On the fourth day Geddo threw himself at Ugolino's feet and died. The other three fell between the fifth and sixth days. Ugolino, now blind, groped over all four bodies for three more days, calling to the dead. Then fasting got the mastery of grief. He goes back to the skull. Dante turns on Pisa directly: Capraia and Gorgona should dam the Arno and drown every Pisan soul, for even if Ugolino betrayed the castles, his children were innocent, too young for guilt, and Pisa's treatment of them makes it a modern Thebes. Moving on, they enter Ptolomea, traitors to guests, where sinners lie face-up, their frozen tears forming crystal visors that seal the eye-cups completely. A voice begs Dante to clear the ice from its eyes in exchange for a story. Dante agrees. The shade is Friar Alberigo, who invited enemies to a banquet in his "evil garden" and had them killed at the table, "the date more luscious for my fig", the fig being the obscene signal he gave the murderers. He explains Ptolomea's privilege: the soul falls here the moment it betrays, while the body is still alive above, walked around by a demon. Alberigo names Branca Doria, still alive above, his body possessed, and asks Dante to clear his eyes. Dante refuses. "Ill manners were best courtesy to him." The chapter closes with an invective against Genoa: one of its citizens is already soul-deep in Cocytus while his body still moves and eats and dresses itself in the world above.