XXXIII/3 The first personaliiies we meet in hell are Paolo and Francesca. Francesca's is the first voice we hear and she is the only woman from among Hell's denizens who speaks at all. She can thus, as has been pointed out in the notes to Canto V, be taken to stand for Eve, the primal sinner, whose child Cain gives his name to the region we have just passed through. Thus the first and last couples we meet are locked together, the one in love and the other in hate. In both cases only one of the pair speaks to tell a story which might elicit pity. The shadow of Eve is therefore thrown from a moon-like enlargement in negative of her name, from, as it were, the beginning to the end of Hell, set forever in a sky of dark stars. The shadow comes to rest on the coupled skulls of Ruggiero and Ugolino, which are themselves merely tilted and joined adaptations of the heads (after Michelangelo's Adam and Eve) of Paolo and Francesca from Canto V/4. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.