It may seem a bit awkward that an editor of this Bulletin should wish to publish in it a negative response to a contribution for which he himself recommended publication (along with all other members of our editorial board).  On the other hand, we have made efforts to be open to different points of view and to not "pre-censor" work by others, only requiring that their work be original, plausible, and effectively presented.  And so I did not oppose publication of Camozzi's note, even though I had serious reservations about all of its main points.  I hope he will entertain my responses as cordially as I entertained his arguments.  I will address them in order.

(1) l’antropofagia cranica: We know Dante's source text for Ugolino's gnawing on Ruggieri's skull: Statius, Thebaid VIII.751-762.  And we know it because Dante himself cites the text (Inf. XXXII.130-132).  In the Latin epic Tydeus, mortally wounded himself, is brought (by Capaneus) the moribund body of the man who killed him, Melanippus (Dante has, wittingly or not, changed his name to "Menalippo").  Several of their troops then behead the dying man and bring the gory caput to the dying Tydeus, who takes it in his hands and ravages it with his teeth.  We know that Dante knew Statius; we do not know that he knew Achmet ben Sirin's Oneirocriticon.  Further, the passage adduced by Camozzi ("Si autem contemplatus fuerit quod caput hominis comedat in prelatum suum dolose aget et male operabitur.  Forte autem et dignitati suae succedet.[…]") has only a most tenuous (and surely possibly coincidental) link to Dante's presentation of Ugolino's gnawing of Ruggieri's head in any case.  Nonetheless, Camozzi argues: "Ma la ragione che collega il cannibalismo cranico all’azione fraudolenta non si trova nel poema latino."  However, this "connection" will not turn out to be convincing (see [4] il sogno di Ugolino, below).  On the other hand, the "cannibalistic" behavior of the characters, both in Statius and in Dante, most certainly is comparable and surely seems to be related: The "victim" (Tydeus/Ugolino) is infuriated by the man who has bested him and caused his death (Melanippus/Ruggieri). That seems like a pretty exact case of parallelism, at least to this reader.  And the absence of fraud, in both cases, is not in either a reason to jettison the importance of the Statian text in favor of Achmet's.  In his analysis of the significance of the dream, Achmet states that it points to the head-chewer's accession to the arch-bishopric.  This is surely not relevant to the situation in Dante.  The pointedly different results, it seems to me, make the possibility of the presence of a "reference" here miniscule (as do the odds that Dante had access to this material). And, in any case, in addition to being specifically cited by Dante, the Statian text accounts for more of the material than Camozzi would like us to believe.

(2) le cagne: His second piece of evidence (the supposed resonance of the "Kanes" found in the Somniale Danielis) is perhaps the least convincing part of Camozzi's argument.  There are any number of medieval texts in which dogs pursue their quarry, including Dante's own: Inferno 13.125, in which the spendthrifts are pursued by nere cagne through the forest of the suicides, or Inferno 23.18, where a dog ravages a rabbit it has pursued (or even Paradiso 4.6, where a hunting dog cannot decide which of two does to pursue).  It also seems likely that no "fons" was needed at all: Dante had the history -- actual or imagined -- of Ugolino's capture to build his own "dream" from.   At any rate, to argue that Dante was indebted for this detail to the Somniale Danielis (or to the translation of Achmet's Arabic book on dreaming) is to employ an extravagantly vulnerable argument.

(3) le lune: Consultation of the text of the poem indicates that Dante does on occasion (at least when indicating a period of time rather than the disc in the heavens) use the word luna with the sense of "month" (only three possible occurrences out of sixteen), but if he never elsewhere did so, those of us arguing for the sense of lune in this passage as "months" rather than "days" might be at some disadvantage.  On the other hand, this is the only use of the plural lune in the poem.  Indeed, the word luna usually refers to the celestial body in the sky.  However, in Inferno 26.130-131, it does so in such a way as to indicate that one measures the passing time in lunar months: "Cinque volte racceso e tante casso / lo lume era di sotto de la luna."  However, a much later use is even more telling: Paradiso 27.132 refers to the sinful child who ingests "qualunque cibo per qualunque luna," pretty clearly referring to the months of the calendar with their indicated fast-days.  Camozzi argues that in Ugolino's account, the "più lune" should be reckoned as "giorni e non mesi."  This would bring Dante's text into sharp disagreement with the history of the events, which Dante counts on our sharing.  For instance, Venturi (1732) points out that Villani says Ugolino was imprisoned from August until March.  And most of the early commentators (with one astounding exception, as we shall see) do indeed insist that Ugolino was imprisoned for at least half a year before his offspring and he were put to death.

We also find that, in his narrative of the days of their steady progress toward death, Ugolino never uses luna but only the following terms related to time and its passage: innanzi la dimane (v. 37), giorno and notte (v. 53), sol (v. 54), dì (vv. 65, 67, 72). Thus, in my (and most people's) judgment, the traditional reading of lune (v. 26) as "months" is simply correct.  Nonetheless, it is interesting to study the entire exegetical tradition on this problem.  All the early commentators, with one important exception, think that lune is the correct reading and means "months"; however, Benvenuto, erroneously (yes, even Benvenuto does occasionally make mistakes) thinking that Dante has Ugolino's imprisonment and starvation beginning simultaneously, and thus understands lune as indicating paucis diebus.  Gregorio Di Siena tries to resurrect the rejected reading lume, but the issue is effectively (and finally, until just now with Camozzi's argument) settled by Scartazzini: Ugolino was imprisoned for about eight months (= lune).  For over 125 years, having witnessed a dispute over this word, the commentary tradition is (as is fairly rarely the case) united.  The moon is the means for Ugolino to be aware of the passage of the longer period of his imprisonment; the sun, on the other hand, measures his day-by-day torment.

(4) il sogno di Ugolino: The context of the "archivescoval" dream in Achmet's book is counter to the situation of Ugolino, who will be undone by his prelat, not triumph over him, thus advancing to his place.  Camozzi admits: "È pur vero che nel manuale di Achmet il manducatore coincide senza dubbio con l’autore della frode."  However, he goes on to argue that, in the Commedia, "al contrario, se non si considerano le azioni che lo condannano al luogo da cui ora parla, Ugolino passa per il personaggio tradito, vittima."  Not exactly.  Ugolino is presented by Dante as a committer of fraud, otherwise he would not be here; it is Ugolino who wants to make Dante believe (that is the bet that he accepts from Dante at the close of Inferno XXXII) that he is not guilty of fraud.  In my view (and in that of many others), he rather dramatically fails to do that.  In fact, Ugolino's dream is very different from the cannibalistic dream registered in Achmet's book: In his dream, he is not the victimizer but the victim, brought down by the Pisan dogs.  We should by now be aware that, if we listen to the self-presentations of Dante's most sympathetic-seeming characters without a critical sense of their dishonesty, we will miss the point of his ironic management of their narratives, all of which are dedicated to showing them up as the deceivers that they were -- and still are.