We’ve walked with Dante and Virgil to the final revelation of INFERNO: Satan, stuck at the center of the earth, a mere edifice, pure structure, motion without movement, and the end of our journey down. We may have also come to the end of Dante’s infernal poetics. The poet must now find a new way to write as he dies to his old ways and comes alive to what’s ahead.

Brother Alberigo is the last sinner to speak in Dante’s INFERNO—and his speech is one of the last chances for Dante’s capacious imagination to open wide. We get zombies. We get theological problems. We get classical references. In other words, we get a final moment when Dante can sum up his work in INFERNO with one of the most unforgettable sequences in the canticle of pain.

Dante and Virgil continue on down to the third ring of Cocytus where 1) the text itself gets funky, 2) Virgil returns to the text to tell us he’s not necessary, and 3) the poet Dante may make a gaffe in his plot. Hey, it’s slippery out on the ice. Oh, and the last of the damned who speak in hell cries out, asking for a kindness from our travelers.

One final episode on Count Ugolino, one of the most troubling and appetizing (!) figures in Dante’s INFERNO. Ugolino as a master manipulator and a narcissist, found particularly in the ways he breaks his own narrative flow. And then questions of the ethics of the passage. Why is Archbishop Ruggieri in hell? How can Dante condemn all Pisans if sin is an individual’s choice? How can Dante control a passage so full of irony and ambivalence?

Count Ugolino may appear to give one of the more secular monologues in all of COMEDY. In fact, Dante has woven the monologue out of a tapestry of references to the New Testament. Ugolino is both a parody and an affirmation of the core of Jesus’ teaching—and a fitting figure to start our approach to Purgatory.

Count Ugolino is given the longest speech in Dante’s INFERNO. And he’s the last great sinner of hell, the last big monologue that has caused centuries of interpretive debate. In this episode of the podcast, I try to place Ugolino in the larger rubric of INFERNO. How does he echo other sinners we’ve met? How does he sum up much of the work of INFERNO? Why does Dante leave us with him as our last memory before the final revelation?

We come to the last great sinner of hell: Count Ugolino. Our first of several podcast episodes on him. What’s his backstory? Who was the “real” Count Ugolino? And what can we glean by a close-reading of his monologue, the last inset story of COMEDY?

Dante the pilgrim (with the silent Virgil) leads us across the ice sheet of Cocytus to the most disgusting scene in INFERNO: a moment of cannibalism and the final great sinner of hell. With a few textual problems in this passage, we really come to see one of the great roots of Dante’s art: polyphony.

Dante the pilgrim comes across one of the most infamous traitors of his day: Bocca degli Abati, frozen into the ice sheet of Antenora in the second sub-ring of the final circle of hell, the ice sheet Cocytus. But there’s more to this passage that meets the eye. Is the pilgrim a devil? And is the poet a success in INFERNO, Canto XXXII?

Dante and Virgil cross into Antenora, the second sub-ring of Cocytus, the ice sheet that makes up the ninth and last circle of hell. Here, they find those who have been treacherous to their own political parties or countries—perhaps in the same way that Dante the poet is being a traitor to his own literary party, good ol’ silent Virgil.

As we approach the bottom of INFERNO, let’s look back at six of the basic types of similes that Dante the poet has used to craft and enhance the pilgrim’s journey across the known universe. We’ll take a look at the three most basic types of similes Dante uses, then look at three more types that are perhaps developments of these original three.

Dante finds the first set of traitors in the first subset of the ninth circle of hell: Caïna. These are the bad boys who’ve offed family members for land, money, and/or power. They’re a nasty set, dominated by one poor storyteller who proves both a snitch and a mewling, petty sinner, someone who just wants to get back to his misery. This is INFERNO at some of its most nightmarish.

Dante and Virgil begin to walk across the final circle of hell, a terrifying ice sheet, where they encounter disembodied voices, the damned frozen in the ice, and a place of utter immobility—and where we encounter a couple of textual problems, including a couple of moments in which our great poet may have nodded off and forgotten some of the details of his own poem.

We begin Inferno, Canto XXXII, not with Dante the pilgrim of Virgil, but with the poet Dante who has realized the limits of his craft here at the bottom of hell. At the foundations of everything, the gorgeous structure he’s built begins to tilt, not only in its conception, but even in its very poetics.

Antaeus isn’t such a bad guy. He’s just the traitor who lets the invaders, Dante the pilgrim and Virgil, into his master Satan’s final kingdom. We end INFERNO, Canto XXXI, where we began: with a host of similes and metaphors and a wicked irony that brings Roland and Charlemagne into a murky yet intriguing light.

Virgil must flatter his way to the center of the earth, the floor of hell, the ninth circle of INFERNO. But Antaeus doesn’t seem to be taken in by repeated references to Lucan’s PHARSALIA. The only thing that does the trick is the promise of Dante’s success as a poet—which then pits poet against poet in this liminal space between the eighth and ninth circles of INFERNO.

Three more giants after Nimrod—crosscurrents of classical literature and Biblical traditions, all bound in a poem based on classical sources, one of which (The Aeneid) is under incessant revision by its own author, Virgil. We’re approaching the bottom of everything. We’re also in a liminal spot between the circles of INFERNO. No wonder all bets are off.

Dante the pilgrim finds his first giant in the liminal spot between the eighth and ninth circles of hell. It’s Nimrod, a shadowy figure in the Bible who gathers much Christian mythological moss over the years to become a complicated and difficult figure in Dante’s INFERNO.

Virgil promises Dante the pilgrim clarity if they hurry on. But Virgil can’t wait. He explains that the towers are actually giants—which Dante the poet then recasts back into towers, coining a word to preserve the illusion. The poet also keeps INFERNO in the liminal space between the classical and Christian worlds.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil enter the liminal space of Canto XXXI, the terrain between the eighth and ninth circles of hell. Here, Dante experiences a series of reversals, misperceptions, and transgressive truth claims, as is common in any liminal space.