About A Professor
Un Professore (A Professor) is an Italian drama produced for Rai 1 that follows Dante Balestra, an unconventional philosophy teacher who returns to Rome and takes a post at a public high school. Loosely inspired by the Spanish series Merli, the show uses the classroom as a stage where big questions from the history of thought, about love, freedom, death, friendship and identity, are made urgent and personal for a group of teenagers finding their way into adulthood.
Alessandro Gassmann anchors the series as Dante, a warm, irreverent and sometimes infuriating man who teaches by provocation rather than rote. His return to the city forces him to reconnect with Simone, the teenage son he has barely known, who happens to be enrolled at the same school. As teacher and father, Dante stumbles as often as he inspires, and the series is honest about how hard it is to show up for the people closest to you while preaching wisdom to a roomful of students.
Around Dante and Simone orbits an ensemble of students and families whose lives tangle together across the school year. Storylines touch on first love, sexuality, grief, divorce and the quiet pressures young people carry, handled with a humane, unsensational eye. Anita Ferraro, a fellow parent and eventual love interest, and her own son Manuel become part of Dante's widening circle, so that the school, the staff room and the surrounding neighborhood gradually feel like one extended, imperfect family.
Across two seasons of twelve episodes each, A Professor became one of RAI's most popular contemporary dramas, praised for Gassmann's lived-in performance and for treating teenagers and their questions with real seriousness. Each lesson Dante gives doubles as a lens on the characters' lives, turning philosophy into something practical and felt, and making the show a gentle argument that learning how to think is also learning how to live.
