The grisly death of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his sons

Count Ugolino della Gherardesca is remembered in history largely thanks to Dante Aligheri  , who featured him as someone he met in the Inferno of his famous Divine Comedy , and reminds readers of his infamous and horrendous death, abandoned with his sons and grandsons to starve in a prison not far from where visitors now queue to go up the Leaning Tower.

The story reawakened my interest when I saw the bronze relief of this horrible story made by Pierino da Vinci in 1550 -1553 at the Bronze Exhibition in the Royal Academy this week.

The bronze has it’s own story as it was lost and only rediscovered in Chatsworth House in 2010

The ill fated Ugolino was born in Pisa into the della Gherardesca family, who were a noble family of Germanic origins. They had sufficient alliance with the Emperors of    Hohenstaufen to get political influence in Tuscany and became the leader of the Ghibellines in Pisa, by political definition they were therefore in opposition to the Guelfs and  thus to the Papacy.

Ugolino was condemned to his  punishment for his political ambitions which led to his agreeing, as podestra  (mayor)  to sell some Castles in prime defensive positions to the ever opposing forces of Florence. He was locked into the tower of Cavalieri Square, together with his children and grandchildren, and the keys thrown in the Arno – with no sustenance and no hope of rescue they finally all starved to death.

The Dante story – and local history – suggests that the surviving family members were compelled by their hunger to feed upon the bodies of those of them who had died – in fact it is told that the children offered their bodies to their father to keep him alive, but notwithstanding this struggle for survival nobody came out of the tower alive.  Dante – as an exiled Florentine showed some sympathy for the family and used the story as another example of the perfidy of the Pisans.

Although evidence has recently been found to suggest that the bodies were in fact, eaten, there is also a point of view that a 79 year old medieval man probably wouldn’t have had the strength in his teeth – if indeed he had any – to tear into the flesh of his progeny, and it is therefore more likely that all the bodies were actually devoured by rats.