This week brought us a short Italian season from Sky Arts, with a mix of history, art history, music and literature: programmes looked at Casanova, La Scala, Artemisia Gentileschi, Raphael and a more recent cultural treasure, the actress Claudia Cardinale.

Kicking off the series, though, was Dante and the Invention of Hell (19 September), a bold attempt to explain the poet to a modern audience. You can see why they plumped for the Inferno as their starting point. Does anybody ever read the other two parts of the Divine Comedy?

This film took a visual route through this knotty territory, showing us lots of paintings and sculptures that would not have existed without the Florentine’s remarkable imagination. Meanwhile, the voice-over recounted some of the key moments in the poem’s narrative.

Finding moving pictures to illustrate a medieval poem, though, was always going to be a challenge. What we saw here was ingenious. The various circles of hell were represented through a sort of modern dance: beautiful young people, often semi-naked, shot in black and white and writhing around in slow motion.