The Ninth Canto is an improvement over the Eighth Canto, but still lacks (in my mind) any of the transcendent passages we sometimes saw earlier.

What makes it interesting is the impressionistic and broken construction of, not first person, but third person narrations limited to a single person at a time. Also, he uses (and he has used this before, but not to this extent) these broken and incomplete quotes, most of which read like fragments of progress reports (some read more as oral reports, other as written reports).

As in the previous Canto, the “setting” is clearly Renaissance Italy.

Also, and purely as a bit of trivia, at seven and a half pages, it is the longest Canto thus far (most of the others were just two or three pages).