In the opening shot of the opening episode of Dante: Inferno to Paradise, a candle atop a leather-bound volume flickers as the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley scroll in a three-line stanza across the screen, closely followed by a second stanza made up of two lines.

Poets are the mirrors
of the gigantic shadows
which the future casts upon the present.

Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821

The choice of an author from the English Romantic tradition, who is best known for his fourteen-line sonnet Ozymandias, and composed the poem quoted above exactly five hundred years after Dante’s death may seem an odd addition, particularly to the introduction of such an important and culturally important piece of art to both Italy and the U.S. Is Dante—who is portrayed moving in a shadowy hue across the background—the mirror of the giant shadow cast upon the present? Though one may at first think of Dante more as the illuminating candle than a reproducer of shadow, one understands that Shelley’s prophetic words relate to Dante’s enduring influence on the present, acknowledged or not.