Synopsis
After more than 250 episodes, at the end of the twelfth series, a legitimate question arises: why a new season of Don Matteo?
Because “Don Matteo” is more than a series, it is a large family, known and loved by Italian families.
Because it does not cease to enchant the audience with its unique blend of mystery and comedy, lightness and drama.
Because we need a positive look on the world and its contradictions, like the one that our characters know how to bring.
But above all, because it can be a new opportunity.
An opportunity to go further, exploring issues that are new and cross-cutting for all generations.
Without betraying its audience and its soul, through the format of mystery cases Don Matteo 13 can continue to turn its gaze on current issues that affect society and our way of life, highlighting moral problems and contradictions, without ever losing the hope and the serenity that distinguish our series.
As now almost a ‘format’, often these issues will closely concern young people: Don Matteo can continue to give us a key to storytelling in a strong, but at the same time positive and balanced way, the problems that affect adolescents and their relationship with their parents and with the adult world in general.
In this new series, in fact, Don Matteo will welcome to the Rectory Federico, a seventeen-year-old with a difficult past: abandoned again by his mother, now all he wants is to take care of his brother Clementino, a newborn of only a few months. Thanks to his meeting with Don Matteo, but also thanks to Greta, one of his classmates who has had a complicated childhood, this gruff and short-tempered boy will learn to manage his emotions, as well as believing that miracles are possible.
But Don Matteo 13 is also an opportunity to introduce new characters to the arena of the series and at the same time to tell something more about those already known and that we believe we already know perfectly.
Starting with Don Matteo, of course… In this new series we will see him in difficulty, struggling with a fresh wound that forces him to reflect on his being the spiritual father of everyone and dealing with those emotions that he had always been able to keep at bay: pain, anger, the sense of helplessness. But it is precisely in difficult moments that new aspects of his character emerge: fallibility, a paternal feeling, but also an unshakable hope in the future.
But Don Matteo would not be Don Matteo without his constant allies/antagonists: the Carabinieri.
The barracks of Spoleto, between one investigation and another, is now the second home of Marshal Cecchini, as well as of Captain Anna Olivieri and of Public Prosecutor Marco Nardi. And that’s how we had left them: Marco had finally obtained Anna’s forgiveness, but not her love. She had instead decided to get involved with Sergio, forgiving his mistakes and waiting for him to serve his sentence. What now?
Now Anna and Marco are friends. Anna has arranged everything for the arrival of Sergio, ready to start a new life with him and Ines, who in the last months has lived with Don Matteo in the rectory, and Nardi, who, in order to keep Anna in his life, has ‘settled for’ being her best friend. But things are never so simple and a thousand complications await these two.
And of all these complications, one has a very specific name: Valentina, Colonel Anceschi’s daughter, Cecchini’s goddaughter, who moves to Spoleto to try to get her life back on track. Valentina hides a wound, a secret that wears her down emotionally, but Cecchini will help her move forward and discover who she truly is. Nardi will also approach her, rediscovering sides of himself that he did not remember having, and that perhaps are the ones that made Anna fall in love with him in the first place …
In short, Don Matteo 13 remains faithful to itself, continuing the journey in today’s life and society, but is renewed, thanks to the arrival of a new character. The spiritual son of Don Matteo, to whom our priest will pass the baton, who will have to show that he is capable of having that irreducible and positive outlook and that conviction that it is always possible to change and forgive, qualities that have always characterised Don Matteo.
