The Belacqua episode plays an important role in the Comedy because it is a friendly meeting with an artisan from Florence and it is about contemplation and action.
It is remarkable critics, science of culture and later authors never wrote much about it as it could be the heart of an analysis of what happened with the efforts to write the medieval poem. To illustrate my point I refer to a modern and well acclaimed man of letters, Giorgio Petroccihi, who wrote, probably because he was looking for an explanation, that the Belacqua episode is bizar (... di un episodio bizzaro qual è quello legato al personaggio di Belacqua.).
By seeing the stars at night, or during an eclips, knowledge grows and one can indicate the stars during daytime. The names given to the stars and constelations date back to ancient times whereof no written texts are known, but during the medieval period people in Europe began surveying life and accumulatiing observations which we now call science. Otherwise said, poetry became an object and artigiany one had to learn and invent, and contemplation was set aside more and more in order to give action more importance. Unlike pots made of clay having a specific function and style periods of pottery change mostly the decoration of the objects, Western civilization started something different with gathering both experience and knowledge about changing the world and looking at the future in front of us.
Knowledge and data about the stars as we can see them without the light of the sun had also been built up since ancient times. With this in mind we could argue the question Belacqua raises in the episode of Purgatory, after the personage of the poet asked him why he was sitting there and not progressing on his way to the top like all other personages, can be seen as a reference to the accumulation of knowledge about the stars and the changing paths of (inert) people in history.
"Have you clearly seen how the sun pulls the car over its left hand shoulder?"
The Encyclopedia interprets the question by arguing its about the southern hemisphere and the difference of observations of the path of the sun with observations of it on northern half. But what could possibly be the car which is to be seen clearly? Could it be the Wagon,, or Il Carro in Italian?
This could the be seen together with the use of the vernacular instead of Latin, the observations of change, and the progress of knowledge. With a leap into centuries after the medieval period we know the theory of Relativity was verified, with the same but more precise knowledge and better tools, by measuring the transposition of the stars right behind the sun during an eclips.
Although the Comedy, with its harsh rime and staccato rythm, is one of the most ugly poems, it has given Western civilization a force like the striker who hit the ball to go outside the stadium.
