Dante must work off and cleanse away each of them in the seven terraces of purgatory.
Each “P” stands for piaghe (wounds) that form from peccati (sins).
At the entrance of purgatory, an angel inscribes the letter “P” on Dante’s forehead seven times with the tip of his sword, saying “Make sure you cleanse these wounds when you are inside”. The Archbishop later betrayed and imprisoned Ugolino with his offspring, gradually starving them to death.įinally the pilgrims arrive at the centre of the earth, where they must scale the hairy sides of Lucifer to be able to ascend to the surface of the earth to get to purgatory, where they must be cleaned of the stain of hell. In reality Ugolino conspired against his party, the Ghibellines, to bring the opposing Guelfs to power. In the ninth circle, the pilgrims see the Count Ugolino chomping on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, the punishment for treachery. Only their legs can be seen from above, waving around frantically. Having inverted the moral order, they face an eternity buried upside down with their heads in the trenches. In the next, the circle of the fraudulent, Dante and Virgil encounter popes guilty of simony (or the selling of church services). There, men with moneybags hanging round their necks flick off flames, just as dogs shoo away insects in summer. The writer Dante’s friend and compatriot, Giotto was commissioned to paint the inside of the chapel by the son of an infamous usurer that Dante identifies in the seventh circle of hell. These inspired the frescoes depicting the final judgement day that the painter Giotto painted around the walls and ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In the remaining seven circles of hell, Dante and Virgil observe punishments that are so grisly that sinners are reduced to grotesque conditions. They are joined for eternity, inverting the biblical prescription in Matthew that “what God has joined together, let man not separate.” Murdered by Francesca’s husband and Paolo’s brother, Giovanni Malatesta, these two souls drift aimlessly, their bodies fused together as punishment for adultery. There, he encounters the souls of the lustful, including the legendary Tristan and Isolde and the historical Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo. In the second circle, Dante is distraught by the cruelty of the punishment he observes. Francesca and Paolo, adulterers, Gustave Dore, circa 1860.
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