As they walk among the tombs, a voice calls out — Dante's Tuscan dialect has been heard. A shade rises from a tomb to its waist: Farinata degli Uberti, the great Ghibelline leader of Florence, who twice defeated Dante's own Guelph party and was largely responsible for their exile. He rises as if he held all of Hell in contempt — come avesse l'Inferno a gran dispitto. His bearing is magnificent and unbroken even in damnation. He asks Dante who his ancestors were; Dante tells him; Farinata says he was twice their enemy, drove them out twice. Dante shoots back: they always came back — which is more than the Ghibellines can say.
A second shade interrupts — rising from the same tomb, beside Farinata, kneeling. It is Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, father of Dante's closest friend Guido Cavalcanti. He asks: if my son is such a genius, why is he not here with you? Is he not alive? Does he not deserve this honor? Dante hesitates — he uses the past tense, saying that Guido "had" contempt for this journey. Cavalcante interprets the past tense as a signal that Guido is dead, and collapses back into the tomb in grief. (Guido would in fact die later in 1300 — Dante, in the poem's fiction, cannot yet know this; the misunderstanding is tragic and deliberate.) Farinata continues the conversation as if nothing happened — the indifference of a great man to private grief, or perhaps a disassociation from intimacy. He tells Dante that the Ghibelline exile of the Guelphs will be permanent (wrong, as history shows), and explains the strange limitation of the heretics' knowledge: they can see the distant future perfectly but are blind to the near present. When the Last Judgment seals time, their knowledge will go dark entirely.