Canto XXIV

“I am Vanni Fucci the beast, and Pistoia was a worthy lair for me” (24.125-126, 269).

Durling notes that Vanni “was a violent member of the White Cancellieri faction of Pistoia” and that he “was responsible for a number of crimes and acts of violence, the most serious murder, in 1293 or 1294” (337). A note from the website, Danteworlds adds that Vanni “was a black guelph from Pistoia, a town not far from rival Florence”. Vanni explains in Canto 24 that he is “placed so far / down because I stole the beautiful appointments / from sacristy” (lines 136-138). Durling explains that those “beautiful appointments from sacristy” were “sacred objects… two silver tablets with the images of the Virgin and the apostles from the chapel of San Iacopo” (378). In his defiance and raising “his hands with both the figs” at God, he is compared to Capaneus. In the story from Virgil, Capaneus is one of the Seven against Thebes. He defies the gods and, above all, Zeus in his hubris saying no one could stop him from climbing the walls of Thebes during their siege of the city. Zeus strikes him down with a thunderbolt, in the same way Vanni is taken down in his punishment in Hell by being bitten by a snake and reduced to ashes. (SJ)