These notes cover part of the lectures presented by Andrea Maselli for the 59th Winter School of Theoretical Physics and third COST Action CA18108 Training School ‘Gravity – Classical, Quantum and Phenomenology’. The school took place at Pałac Wojanów, Poland, from February 12th to 21st, 2023. The lectures focused on some key aspects of black hole physics, and in particular on the dynamics of particles and on the scattering of waves in the Schwarzschild spacetime. The goal of the course was to introduce the students to the concept of black hole quasi normal modes, to discuss their properties, their connection with the geodesic motion of massless particles, and to provide numerical approaches to compute their actual values.