What happens if the new Italian teacher is a strange guy who comes up with a new one every day? He hangs signs, draws maps, improvises quizzes, sets the desk with a tea service. He explains grammar like a game of chess, writes etymological formulas on the blackboard and solves them like puzzles, turns words into stories full of twists and turns. He crosses them, manipulates them, invents them, translates them into sounds and colours, flavours and scents. Along with literary classics, he quotes songs, comics, films and never stops conversing with all the students: he listens, comments, jokes, encourages. An unpredictable professor who occasionally balances something on his head and remains motionless until silence returns; he never gives grades and only writes advice in sonnet form on his report card. It happens that learning the language, its rules, its history becomes a fascinating adventure. Grammar, after all, is just the art of saying things in the right way at the right time. So here is the Accademia d'arte grammatica: a secret society where boys and girls meet outside school to have fun playing with the Italian language. It happens that such an experience can change your life. And indeed, to the person telling this story - years later, with undiminished emotion and a bit of nostalgia - life changed it.