GHERARDESCA, UGOLINO DELLA (c. count of Donoratico, was the head of the powerful family of Gherardesca, the chief Ghibelline house of Pisa. He allied himself by marriage with the Visconti, leaders of the Guelph faction in the city. For his share in the defeat of the Pisans by the Genoese at the battle of Meloria (1284) see MELORIA and PISA : History. He was accused of treachery, and increased his own unpopularity by ceding castles to Florence and Lucca, and by his hesitation to make peace with Genoa, lest the return of the Pisan prisoners, including the leading Ghibellines, should diminish his power. Civil war broke out in Pisa in 1288, stirred up by Gherardesca's rival the archbishop Ruggieri, who captured the count, his two sons, Gaddo and Uguccione, and his grandsons, and starved them to death in the Muda, a tower belonging to the Gualandi family. Dante, in a terrible but magnificent passage, placed Ugolino and Ruggieri in the second ring of the lowest circle of the Inferno.
See P. Tronci, Annali Pisani (2 vols., Pisa, 1868-71) ; S. de Sismondi, Histoire des republiques italiennes (Brussels, 1838) ; also the various annotated editions of Dante, especially W. W. Vernon's Readings from the Inferno, vol. ii. (2nd ed., 1905).