Asdente

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Asdente is listed by Dante among the figures placed in the eighth ditch of the eighth circle, dedicated to the fraudulent, in particular to magicians, soothsayers, and astrologers. His name is mentioned in Canto XX of the Inferno, within a list that includes Michael Scot and Guido Bonatti, presented as "famous modern men" of Dante's own time. According to the notes to the canto, Asdente is recalled as an example of one who has abandoned his own trade to devote himself to the divinatory art, similarly to the women who, according to the exegetical note, have left "the needle, the shuttle, and the spindle" to give themselves to divination. His placement among the falsifiers and the sorceresses, grouped together with Guido Bonatti and Michael Scot, reflects Dante's polemical stance against the divinatory arts, treated with sarcasm and contempt, and associated with fraud.