La porta rossa

La porta rossa ([la ˈpɔrta ˈrossa], lit. 'The Red Door') is an Italian noir television series created by Carlo Lucarelli and Giampiero Rigosi for Rai Fiction. It premiered on Rai 2 on February 22, 2017 and concluded on February 1, 2023, having aired 32 episodes over three seasons.

The pilot episode attracted the largest audience of the night, amassing 3.284 million viewers, more than double the network average at the time. The series was praised for being "the only [Italian] mainstream TV crime series that resembles genre literature and not a mainstream TV drama", its "modern and demanding" visuals and dark setting, but its second season was criticized as "excessively distressing".

Series overview

Trieste. Leonardo Cagliostro (Lino Guanciale), an impulsive police commissioner not at all inclined to follow procedures and directives dictated by his superiors, is investigating the most difficult case of his career: his own murder.

In fact, Cagliostro was killed during a solitary police action, but, instead of walking through the red door leading to the afterlife, he chose to stay in the earthly world, thus becoming a ghost, to find his killer: this is the only way he'll be able to save his estranged wife, magistrate Anna Mayer (Gabriella Pession), who, according to some visions that Cagliostro has been having since his death, will be murdered by the same killer during the Christmas season. He is helped by Vanessa Rosic (Valentina Romani), a 17-year-old student who finds out she can communicate with the dead and is the only one who can see and hear him, and Jonas Sala (Andrea Bosca), a fellow ghost who helps Cagliostro to get used to his new condition.