Ugolino lifts his mouth from the skull and wipes it on the hair. His story: he was imprisoned in the Torre della Fame — the Tower of Hunger — with his sons and grandsons. He says nothing of the political treachery that put him there; he speaks only of the moment he heard the tower door being nailed shut, and understood what was happening. He looked at his children's faces. One morning Gaddo stretched out his arms and cried "Father, why don't you help me?" and died. Anselmuccio and the twin boys cried out for food; he bit his own hands in grief; they offered him their bodies to eat — thinking he was biting his hands from hunger, not grief. He refused. Then they died one by one. He describes going blind. And then, fasting having more power than grief, he ate. The horror is exact: the story stops where it stops. Dante does not tell us what Ugolino ate. He doesn't need to. Ugolino returns his mouth to the skull.
They move into Ptolomea — traitors to guests, named for Ptolemy who killed his father-in-law at dinner. Here the shades lie on their backs in the ice, faces up, tears freezing in their eyes so they cannot even weep. Fra Alberigo — who ordered his relatives killed at dinner, the signal a servant's cry of "bring the fruit" — is here. His body, he tells Dante, still walks the earth: the soul of one who has committed betrayal as profound as his can be claimed by a demon before the body dies; the demon inhabits the walking body, while the soul descends immediately to Hell. Branca d'Oria is another: his body still eats and drinks and sleeps in Genoa while his soul lies in the ice below.