XXIX/3 The reappearance here of the walls of A Folly for Wisdom (cf. IV/1) now broken and reassembled in a topsy-turvy fashion heralds the representatives of Sienese folly often caricatured by Florentines as Dante does here by mentioning some typical spendthrift fools such as Niccolo who was said to have used costly and exotic cloves as the fuel with which he cooked pheasants. The castle walls in their state of disarray and the upside down text on the arms of Siena (copied from a black and white print I saw in a Venice shop window) indicate the reversal of values that Dante castigates. The broken structure now contains, instead of poets and sages, samples of stupidity and decadence half drawn from the imagination and half from memories of school and university contemporaries. The green triangle (cf. Canto IV/1 and XVI/4) is also requoted in irony. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.