This thesis seeks to merge the discourses of music theory (semiotics and narrative) and Dantean literary hermeneutics through the analysis of two musical adaptations of the character Count Ugolino (Inferno, Canto XXXIII). The adaptations, composed by Gaetano Donizetti and Francesco Morlacchi, are first discussed within the frame of their sociocultural context and corresponding critical reception. An analysis of the Morlacchi setting aligns with a tragic reading, and thus fits squarely into the 19th-century Italian understanding of the character, while the Donizetti can only be read ironically, yielding an interpretation that explores Ugolino through the lens of religion and morality.