Farinata degli Uberti — Inferno, Canto 10

Inferno · Canto 10 · Lines 1–51 · Scene 29

Canto IX ended with the two travellers walking along a narrow strip between the wall of Dis and a field of burning, open coffins. Canto X begins on that same strip: «Ora sen va per un secreto calle» (1), now he goes along a hidden path, Virgil first and Dante behind his shoulders. The word «secreto» here means set apart, out of the way. It is a back street of Hell.

Dante asks a question he has been holding since the last canto. The lids of the tombs are all raised and nobody guards them, so can the people inside be seen? Virgil’s answer is stranger than the question. The lids are open now, he says, but they will all be shut «quando di Iosafàt qui torneranno» (11), when the souls come back from Jehoshaphat with the bodies they left on earth. Jehoshaphat is the valley where, according to a tradition built on the prophet Joel, the Last Judgment will take place. Back in Canto VI, Virgil explained that at the end of time every soul will take up its body again. Now we learn what that means here: on Judgment Day these souls get their bodies back, and then the lid comes down for good.

Then Virgil says who lies in this part of the cemetery: Epicurus and all his followers, «che l’anima col corpo morta fanno» (15), who make the soul die with the body. These are people who denied that the soul survives death. The punishment has a grim neatness. They thought the grave was the end, and the grave is where they stay.

Virgil adds that Dante will soon have his answer, and the wish he is keeping quiet as well. That unspoken wish goes back to Canto VI, where Dante asked the glutton Ciacco where certain famous Florentines had ended up, naming Farinata first. Virgil has read him.

Then a voice comes out of one of the tombs. «O Tosco», it says, O Tuscan, you who walk alive through the city of fire speaking so courteously, please stop here. Your way of speaking shows you were born in that noble homeland «a la qual forse fui troppo molesto» (27), to which I was perhaps too harmful. The speaker has placed Dante by his accent before seeing his face.

Dante is frightened and edges closer to Virgil, who tells him sharply to turn round and look: there is Farinata, standing up, visible from the waist up. Then comes one of the best-known images in the poem. Farinata lifts his chest and his forehead «com’avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto» (36), as if he held Hell itself in great contempt. He is standing in a burning coffin and behaving like a lord receiving a visitor.

Virgil pushes Dante forward between the tombs with one piece of advice: «Le parole tue sien conte» (39), let your words be clear. Farinata looks at him a moment, almost scornfully, and asks a single question: «Chi fuor li maggior tui?» (42), who were your ancestors? He does not ask Dante’s name. He asks about his family, because in Farinata’s Florence your family told everyone which side you were on.

Dante tells him everything. Farinata raises his eyebrows a little and says Dante’s people were fierce enemies to him, to his forebears and to his party, so that twice he scattered them. Farinata led the Ghibellines, the faction that generally backed the emperor; Dante’s family were Guelfs, their rivals. The two expulsions he is boasting about happened in 1248 and 1260.

Dante answers back. If they were driven out, they came back from every side, both times; «ma i vostri non appreser ben quell’arte» (51), but your people never learned that art properly. The art is coming home from exile. Farinata’s family was banished and never allowed back.

So the first conversation inside the walls of Dis becomes a quarrel between two Florentines, each speech a short, hard blow. The canto has a sting saved for later: the skill Dante is mocking is one he himself will need.

1. Ora sen va per un secreto calle,2. tra ‘l muro de la terra e li martìri,3. lo mio maestro, e io dopo le spalle.

cultural ref: Line 1 — «secreto calle» — a hidden, out-of-the-way path. Hollander hears Virgil’s «secreti calles» (Aeneid VI.443), the paths that lead Aeneas into the Fields of Mourning, where he meets the shade of Dido and she turns away from him without a word. If the echo is intended, the road into this canto is borrowed from a scene in which a traveller meets someone from his past whom he has wronged, or who believes he has. The Italian adjective chiefly means set apart, between the wall of Dis and the tombs. [Model knowledge · medium]

4. "O virtù somma, che per li empi giri5. mi volvi", cominciai, "com’a te piace,6. parlami, e sodisfammi a’ miei disiri.

vocabulary: Line 5 — «mi volvi» — you turn me. A guide who turns his charge is a guide who chooses the direction. Hollander takes the phrase to register the change of direction at the end of Canto IX, where Virgil turned to the right before passing between the torments and the walls. The descent through Hell is otherwise leftward, and the leftward course resumes at the end of this canto (X.133). Dante’s honorific «O virtù somma» frames a mundane question with high formality, which is typical of his manner with Virgil just after a crisis. [Source: Inferno IX.132; X.133]

7. La gente che per li sepolcri giace8. potrebbesi veder? già son levati9. tutt’i coperchi, e nessun guardia face".

theology: Line 9 — «nessun guardia face» — nobody keeps guard. Durling and Martinez, followed by Hollander, hear in the lifted lids and the missing watch the details of the Resurrection narrative: the sealed tomb, the soldiers posted to guard it, and the stone found rolled away. Where the lids physically sit is not clear from the text; a line in the next canto (XI.6–9) suggests they can be leaned against or hidden behind. The suggestion matters chiefly as the first of several Resurrection echoes that converge on Farinata’s rising at line 32. [Model knowledge · medium]

10. E quelli a me: "Tutti saran serrati11. quando di Iosafàt qui torneranno12. coi corpi che là sù hanno lasciati.

theology: Line 11 — «Iosafàt» — Jehoshaphat, the valley named in Joel 3:2 and 3:12 as the place where the nations will be gathered for judgment. Medieval tradition made it the site of the Last Judgment. Hollander points out that neither Joel nor the judgment scene in Matthew 25:31–46 mentions bodily resurrection, which Dante supplies from other texts. The open lids are therefore provisional: on the day the souls return from the valley with their bodies, every tomb in this circle will close. [Model knowledge · high]

literary key: Line 12 — «coi corpi che là sù hanno lasciati» — with the bodies they left up there. Virgil stated the doctrine in Canto VI: at the last trumpet «ciascun rivederà la trista tomba, / ripiglierà sua carne e sua figura» (VI.97–98). The present line applies that general statement to a specific population with a cruel fit. People who held that the soul dies with the body will receive their bodies back, intact and immortal, and the reunion will seal them in. The resurrection they denied becomes the instrument of their confinement. [Source: Inferno VI.94–99]

13. Suo cimitero da questa parte hanno14. con Epicuro tutti suoi seguaci,15. che l’anima col corpo morta fanno.

history: Line 14 — «Epicuro» — Epicurus (341–270 BC), whose school taught that pleasure, understood as tranquillity, is the highest good. In the Convivio (IV.vi.11–12) Dante describes Epicureanism in those ethical terms without calling it heretical. Here he uses the stricter Christian sense, in which an Epicurean is anyone who denies the soul’s survival. Medieval Italian polemic used the word loosely for the worldly unbeliever: the chronicler Salimbene calls Frederick II «epicureus», and Frederick will be named in this very tomb at X.119. [Model knowledge · high]

translation note: Line 15 — «che l’anima col corpo morta fanno» — who make the soul dead with the body. English versions usually soften the verb to believe or hold. Dante’s «fanno» gives the doctrine agency, as if teaching mortality were an act performed on the soul. Mazzoni, reported by Hollander, suggests the phrasing descends from Servius’s note on Aeneid IV.34, which describes the Epicureans as those who say the soul perishes with the body. The line reads like a gloss turned into verse, which may be exactly what it is. [Model knowledge · medium]

16. Però a la dimanda che mi faci17. quinc’entro satisfatto sarà tosto,18. e al disio ancor che tu mi taci".

literary key: Line 18 — «al disio ancor che tu mi taci» — and the desire you keep silent from me. The desire was voiced once, to Ciacco in the circle of the gluttons: «Farinata e ‘l Tegghiaio, che fuor sì degni» (VI.79), where are they? Ciacco answered that they were «tra l’anime più nere» (VI.85), among the blacker souls. Farinata was the first name on Dante’s list. Whether Virgil literally reads his mind or simply infers what a Florentine would want to see here is a question Hollander leaves open; the poem does the same. [Source: Inferno VI.79–87]

19. E io: "Buon duca, non tegno riposto20. a te mio cuor se non per dicer poco,21. e tu m’ hai non pur mo a ciò disposto".

vocabulary: Line 21 — «non pur mo» — not only now. Dante explains that he keeps his heart hidden from Virgil only to speak briefly, and that Virgil disposed him to do so on earlier occasions too. Hollander links this to the rebuke at the shore of Acheron, where an over-eager question was deferred with «Le cose ti fier conte / quando noi fermerem li nostri passi» (III.76–77) and the pilgrim fell silent in shame. The pupil has learned restraint, and the restraint is about to be tested by the most commanding speaker in the canticle so far. [Source: Inferno III.76–81]

22. "O Tosco che per la città del foco23. vivo ten vai così parlando onesto,24. piacciati di restare in questo loco.

literary key: Line 22 — «O Tosco che per la città del foco» — O Tuscan, who through the city of fire. Farinata’s first words name his listener by region and the place by its defining element. Virgil introduced Dis in the same terms, explaining that its red mosques glow because of «Il foco etterno / ch’entro l’affoca» (VIII.73–74). The vocative «O Tosco» also tells us something about the speaker: in the city of the damned, the first thing this Florentine notices about a living man is where he comes from. [Source: Inferno VIII.67–75]

vocabulary: Line 23 — «parlando onesto» — speaking decorously. «Onesto» in Dante’s Italian usually means seemly, dignified, honourable in bearing, and only secondarily truthful. Farinata has overheard the pilgrim’s exchange with Virgil, a formal address and a modest apology, and approves of its manner. The compliment is also a credential. A man of Farinata’s rank notices whether a stranger speaks like a gentleman before he decides to address him, and his praise establishes the courtly register in which the following quarrel will be conducted. [Model knowledge · medium]

25. La tua loquela ti fa manifesto26. di quella nobil patrïa natio,27. a la qual forse fui troppo molesto".

theology: Line 25 — «La tua loquela ti fa manifesto» — your speech makes you manifest. The line translates almost word for word the Vulgate «loquela tua manifestum te facit» (Matthew 26:73), said to Peter by the bystanders before his second denial of Christ. Hollander notes that commentators have observed the echo since Guido da Pisa, around 1328. The borrowed context is uneasy: recognition by speech, in the Gospel, precedes a disavowal, and here it introduces a man the poem places among those who denied the life to come. [Model knowledge · high]

literary key: Line 27 — «forse fui troppo molesto» — I was perhaps too harmful. Most readers take «forse» as a trace of regret for the slaughter at Montaperti in 1260. Cassell reads it instead as the false modesty of gloating understatement, a reading Hollander invites the reader to consider. Kleinhenz, and Ronconi earlier, proposed a source in Micah 6:3, «quid molestus fui tibi?», God’s question to his people. If the source is active, Farinata borrows the voice of the injured party while speaking to a citizen of the city he defeated. [Model knowledge · medium]

28. Subitamente questo suono uscìo29. d’una de l’arche; però m’accostai,30. temendo, un poco più al duca mio.

31. Ed el mi disse: "Volgiti! Che fai?32. Vedi là Farinata che s’è dritto:33. da la cintola in sù tutto ‘l vedrai".

literary key: Line 31 — «Volgiti! Che fai?» — Turn round! What are you doing? The command repeats, and reverses, the one Virgil gave before the walls of Dis: «Volgiti ‘n dietro e tien lo viso chiuso» (IX.55), turn back and keep your eyes shut, against Medusa. There, turning meant refusing to look. Here it means looking at once. Hollander reads the urgency as a sign that the pilgrim, frightened by the voice, was about to back away, a small piece of comedy that the narrator records without comment. [Source: Inferno IX.55–60]

literary key: Line 33 — «da la cintola in sù» — from the belt up. Farinata appears as a half-figure, like a portrait bust. Durling and Cassell, independently, identified the pose with the imago pietatis, the image of Christ rising waist-up from the tomb. If the identification holds, the man who denied the resurrection performs it. Within the canto the measurement also sets up a contrast: Cavalcante, rising from the same tomb, will be visible only «infino al mento» (X.53), up to the chin, perhaps kneeling. [Source: Durling (1981); Cassell (1984); Inferno X.52–54]

34. Io avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto;35. ed el s’ergea col petto e con la fronte36. com’avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto.

vocabulary: Line 36 — «dispitto» — contempt, scorn, from Latin despectus. The line is the scene’s emblem and its interpretive battleground. Romantic readers found the disdain heroic; Hollander notes their enthusiasm drily. The word’s relative «dispettoso» describes Capaneus in the burning sand, who lies «dispettoso e torto» (XIV.47) as if the fire did not touch him. The poem gives the posture of contempt for punishment to two sinners, and in the later case answers it directly: Capaneus’s defiance is called his punishment. [Source: Inferno XIV.46–48]

37. E l’animose man del duca e pronte38. mi pinser tra le sepulture a lui,39. dicendo: "Le parole tue sien conte".

vocabulary: Line 39 — «Le parole tue sien conte» — let your words be clear. «Conte» is disputed: known and plain (from cognitus), measured and few (from computus), or refined and noble. Dante uses the word elsewhere in the first sense, as when Virgil promises «Le cose ti fier conte» (III.76), things will be made known to you. Whatever its root, the advice is to speak carefully before a man who has just judged him by his speech. Hollander suggests Virgil may also remember how freely his pupil gave himself away with Francesca. [Source: Inferno III.76]

40. Com’io al piè de la sua tomba fui,41. guardommi un poco, e poi, quasi sdegnoso,42. mi dimandò: "Chi fuor li maggior tui?".

history: Line 42 — «Chi fuor li maggior tui?» — who were your ancestors? «Maggiori» are forebears. In thirteenth-century Florence lineage determined party, and party determined who could hold office, own a tower, or remain in the city. Farinata’s question is therefore a request for Dante’s faction, and his tone is set by «quasi sdegnoso» (41). Dante’s own ancestry receives fuller treatment in Paradiso XV–XVI, where he meets his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida and is warned against pride in noble blood. [Model knowledge · high]

43. Io ch’era d’ubidir disideroso,44. non gliel celai, ma tutto gliel’apersi;45. ond’ei levò le ciglia un poco in suso;

literary key: Line 45 — «levò le ciglia un poco in suso» — raised his eyebrows a little. The gesture is small and exact, a magnate’s reaction to minor gentry. The poem uses it twice more with heavier freight: Satan, who once «contra ‘l suo fattore alzò le ciglia» (XXXIV.35), raised his brows against his maker, and Hollander also links Manfred’s brow in Purgatorio III. Read through those later lines, the lifted eyebrow is pride in miniature, though in this scene it reads first as social disdain. [Source: Inferno XXXIV.34–36]

46. poi disse: "Fieramente furo avversi47. a me e a miei primi e a mia parte,48. sì che per due fïate li dispersi".

history: Line 48 — «per due fïate li dispersi» — twice I scattered them. The two Guelf expulsions from Florence were in 1248, with imperial backing, and in 1260, after the Ghibelline victory at Montaperti on 4 September. The Guelfs returned in 1251 and again after the Angevin victory at Benevento in 1266, after which the Uberti were banished and excluded from every subsequent peace. Farinata died around 1264, so he did not live to see the second return. [Model knowledge · high]

49. "S’ei fur cacciati, ei tornar d’ogne parte",50. rispuos’io lui, "l’una e l’altra fïata;51. ma i vostri non appreser ben quell’arte".

wordplay: Line 49 — «d’ogne parte» — from every side. Dante answers Farinata’s «a mia parte» (47), my party, with the same word in a different sense: the Guelfs came back from every quarter. The rhyme then closes on «quell’arte» (51), the art of returning from exile. The word will return twice in Farinata’s reply, «S’elli han quell’arte … male appresa» (X.77) and «tu saprai quanto quell’arte pesa» (X.81). Hollander compares the exchange to a tenzone, the formal poetic quarrel, already glimpsed with Filippo Argenti. [Source: Inferno X.77, 81; VIII.31–39]

Greatness Undiminished

The scene grants Farinata a stature no punishment touches, and the poem means the reader to feel it. His speech is courteous before it is proud; he recognises a fellow citizen by his language and asks him to stay. The narrator gives him the line of the canto, and the Romantic reading that followed it has never fully lost the field because the verse supports it. Dante also addresses him with the «voi» reserved for only three Florentines in Hell. The canto will soon reveal that he alone saved Florence at Empoli, and nothing in these tercets diminishes him in advance. The damnation is real, and so is the grandeur, and Dante declines to let one cancel the other.

Key passage: «ed el s’ergea col petto e con la fronte / com’avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto» (35–36): the narrator, who controls every adjective, chooses a simile that dignifies.

Pride on Display

The splendour is the indictment. Every detail the admirers cite is also a sign the poem uses elsewhere for pride: chest and brow, the half-disdainful look, the eyebrows Satan lifts against his maker. Farinata’s first question reduces a living man on a journey through eternity to a party label, and his boast about scattering Dante’s family is the politics that ruined Florence, spoken from a grave. The scriptural texture, Peter’s denial at 25 and, on Durling’s and Cassell’s reading, the posture of the risen Christ at 32–33, makes the figure a parody of the faith he rejected. Dante builds Farinata large so that the reader can measure how large the error is.

Key passage: «ond’ei levò le ciglia un poco in suso» (45), set against Satan, who «contra ‘l suo fattore alzò le ciglia» (XXXIV.35).

On the page: Farinata’s first words are a request to stop, framed as praise of the pilgrim’s speech (22–24), and his self-description contains the word «forse» (27). Virgil, not Farinata, speaks his name (32). The narrator describes Farinata’s posture with the clause «com’avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto» (36), and his manner with «quasi sdegnoso» (41). The first thing Farinata asks is who Dante’s ancestors were (42). He raises his eyebrows on hearing the answer (45), a gesture the poem later gives to Satan (XXXIV.35). Dante addresses him with the plural of respect (51). Farinata is placed in the sixth circle among the followers of Epicurus (14–15). The historical Farinata was posthumously condemned in 1283 as a Cathar, which the poem does not mention.

What scholars dispute: Whether the poem admires Farinata, condemns him, or does both is the central dispute over this scene, and each side reads the same lines. The posture at 36 is cited as heroic by one tradition and as pride by another; «forse» at 27 is read as regret or as gloating understatement (Cassell); the waist-up rising at 32–33 is read by Durling and Cassell as a parody of the risen Christ, a reading that is persuasive to many and unprovable. Why Dante files a convicted Cathar among Epicureans is not explained anywhere in the text; every explanation is an inference about intent.

The scene never says why this man is in this tomb. History offers a Cathar conviction; the poem offers Epicurus; Farinata himself offers neither, and talks only about Florence. Nor does the narrator, who reports Farinata’s posture with evident force, tell us what he thought of it. The quarrel at 46–51 ends with Dante ahead on points, but the word he scores with, «arte», is left hanging, and the canto has not yet said what it will cost him.

The Open Question

Farinata stands in a burning tomb as if he held Hell in contempt, asks after Dante’s ancestors before his name, and wins the first exchange with a boast about scattering them. Is the poem showing us greatness that damnation cannot shrink, or using the full splendour of the figure to expose a pride so complete that it survives even the evidence of its own error?

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