Evening. A soul in the valley begins to sing the Te lucis ante, the Compline hymn sung at nightfall to ask God's protection through the darkness. The other souls join in. The moment is one of the most affecting in all of Purgatorio: great and powerful men of history, reduced to humility, singing vespers prayers in a flower-filled valley, waiting. Dante is seized with nostalgia and longing — the image of evening bells calling men home.
Two angels descend from above — their robes green as fresh leaves, the color of hope. They carry blunted, flameless swords. They take their places at opposite ends of the valley to guard it. Sordello explains that as dusk comes, a serpent will appear — the same serpent, perhaps, as in Genesis — and the angels are sent each night to drive it away. The serpent does indeed come, sinuous and daring along the valley floor. One of the angels swoops and drives it off. The nightly reenactment of Eden's temptation, here safely repelled, signals what Purgatory is: paradise being reconstructed, the fall being slowly reversed.
Dante speaks with Nino Visconti, a judge of Gallura, an old political friend, who asks after his daughter Giovanna and mourns that his widow has already forgotten him and remarried — the Visconti arms replaced by the Malaspina on her breast. Dante also encounters Conrad Malaspina, who makes a prophecy: within seven years, Dante will experience with his own feet that the Malaspina family's generosity is renowned — a prophecy pointing to Dante's own exile and the hospitality the Malaspina clan will show him.