Dante silences Virgil, silences his reader (me!), and sets out to describe the most daring metamorphosis yet in COMEDY. It’s a weirdly erotic tale of the beast with two backs which becomes two things . . . and not something, but nothing. Lots of Ovid, lots of poetic license, and a wild story that demands so much from its (silenced) reader.

Vanni Fucci runs off, pursued by Cacus, a centaur toting lots of snakes and even a dragon. Virgil explains who Cacus is. Too bad Virgil’s explanation doesn’t match his own in THE AENEID. Or Livy’s. Or Ovid’s. Too bad no one else seems to know Cacus is a centaur. This passage from INFERNO gets to the heart of Dante’s poetics.

Vanni Fucci, the thief, has offered a clear statement of his crime/sin and an opaque prophecy about the future of Florence and its strife. But Fucci’s got one last act: a blasphemous hand gesture to God. Even so, Dante the poet gets the last laugh. Fucci is tortured by the snakes. Is Comedy really revenge fantasy?

A host of revelations, a plethora of metamorphoses, an elliptical prophecy, and a foul sinner: Vanni Fucci makes himself known in the seventh pit of the evil pouches, the malebolge that make up the giant eighth circle of fraud in INFERNO. And this complicated passage is only setting us up for much to come!

Dante and Virgil finally see some action in the seventh of the malebolge, the evil pouches that make up the great landscape of fraud. Although we still don’t know what sin is being punished, we find out the punishment first: snake bites that can shove a soul through a metamorphosis. Ovid galore!

Dante the pilgrim wants a closer look into the darkness, so he and Virgil descend to a vantage point on the wall. He sees a nightmare of snakes, a swarm of them, all over the naked sinners—while the poet creates his own swarm of poetic texts, allusions, misquotations, and outright literary theft.

Dante is still out of breath but he’s hiding it from Virgil. Instead, he hears an unintelligible voice and wants to get closer to it. So they make their way across the rugged bridge and start to descend a wall toward the seventh of the evil pouches of hell, the seventh of the “malebolge” that make up the great landscape of fraud.

Dante the pilgrim is out of breath from the climb out of the sixth of the malebolge, the evil pouch of the hypocrites, in INFERNO. But Virgil has no sympathy for the pilgrim! He goads him to fame as the poet plays some very heady metatextual games with his readers.

The struggle to get out of the sixth of the malebolge, the evil pouches of fraud, is very real. Virgil has to be an expert mountaineer. Dante the pilgrim ends up out of breath. Why all this emphasis on effort? Could it be that the Dante the poet is realizing the task ahead of him, a task without Virgil as his pure model?

Virgil has suffered four cantos of humiliation, right down to the moment he must confront his failure and ignorance in the sixth of the malebolge, the pit of the hypocrites. But we have to go! The journey can’t stop. How? With some gorgeous lyric poetry, derived partially from Virgil’s writings, of course.

How can I read and interpret and even love Dante’s COMEDY without believing in the religion behind it? Isn’t this the one of the most religious poems around? How then can I read it and even think it’s the greatest work of Western literature without buying into the religion that’s behind . . . no, IN it?

Virgil is in for one last humiliation in the pit of the hypocrites in INFERNO’s eighth circle of fraud: he has to learn you can’t trust the demons. Virgil has been the butt of the joke since Manto and Canto XX. What can the poet Dante do to redeem their relationship?

We finally reach something in hell that even Virgil cannot believe. Dante and his guide find the high priest Caiaphas, crucified on the ground in the sixth of the malebolge of fraud, the pouch of the hypocrites. But why does Virgil gawk? The answer is not as easy as you might think.

Dante has slowed down to talk to two of the hypocrites who have caught his Tuscan dialect. He might be prepared to face friars, notorious for their hypocrisy. Instead, he meets political hypocrites right out of his own past and Florence’s chaos.

Dante and Virgil have slid down the slope into the sixth pit of fraud, the sixth of the malebolge, and find themselves in a monastic procession among guys wearing gilded coats of lead. Welcome to the hypocrites—who are a lot more dangerous than you might think.

An overview of the entire fifth evil pouch, one of the malebolge, in the eighth circle of hell, Inferno’s vast landscape of fraud. I’ll read the entire narrative sequence from Inferno, Canto XXI, line 1 through Canto XXIII, line 57—then I’ll offer some general comments about this vast and spectacular story set inside INFERNO.

The fifth of the malebolge, the evil pouch of fraud all about political grifting, ends up at a literary fantasia about the writing of COMEDY, the creation of meaning from what you read, and the ways that texts predict (!) what will happen to you—which is Dante’s hope for COMEDY.

A nameless political grifter has proposed a game for a bunch of demons in Inferno’s eighth circle: Let’s see how many of my damned ilk I can call out of the boiling pitch. Instead, he gets away. As do Dante and Virgil. And the demons are furious!

The nameless grifter in the fifth of the malebolge, the evil pouches, has a trick up his sleeve. He’s going to try to play a fast one on the demons in INFERNO—which Dante the poet is playing fast ones on his readers!

Our nameless barrator starts to name names in an attempt to save his own skin in this horrifying episode from the fifth of the evil pouches, the malebolge, in the eighth circle of INFERNO—and in an episode that looks forward to ones ahead on the very floor of hell.