Anselmuccio

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Anselmuccio is remembered by Ugolino among the children who, shut up with him in the tower, died of hunger. He is the youngest of the count's two grandsons, son of his eldest son, and his name appears in the scene of the father's weeping and stony silence. Tradition and chronicles designate him with the same diminutive form used by Dante, who here emphasizes its affective value by pairing it with the possessive "mio." Dante numbers him among those whom Ugolino, already blind from starvation, continued to call out to gropingly after seeing them die one by one between the fifth and sixth day, and places him among the "garzoni," presenting him—according to the noted critical view—at the youthful age on which the entire scene of the tower is built. His innocence shares in Ugolino's tragic invocation against Pisa.