In which circle of Hell does Dante encounter the usurers?

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante encounters the usurers in the seventh circle of Hell. They occupy the third ring of that circle, alongside other sinners judged guilty of violence, specifically violence against God, nature, and art.

Virgil explains that human work, or “art,” follows nature, and nature follows God. Because usury makes money generate money without productive labor, Dante treats it as an offense against this divinely ordered relationship. The punishment reflects that judgment: the usurers sit on burning sand beneath a rain of fire, constantly swatting at the flames and scorching ground.

Dante identifies the sinners not mainly by their faces but by the heraldic purses hanging around their necks. The purses display family emblems, linking their obsession with wealth to their punishment. Readers sometimes place them in the eighth circle because fraud is punished there, but Dante’s classification is explicit: usury belongs to the seventh circle’s inner ring.