  In this Thesis I developed a one-dimensional Lagrangian hydrodynamic code
with flux-limited radiation diffusion including gamma-ray transfer in gray
approximation for any given distribution of 56Ni. The code was used to model
bolometric light curves of Type II Plateau supernovae (SNe II-P). Using the
models I performed a consistent comparison with our own large dataset of highly
precise, well-sampled BVI light curves and spectra of SNe II-P. I studied
observational and physical properties of our set of SNe II-P and I analyzed the
correlations between different observed and physical parameters with the aim of
characterizing the explosion and progenitor properties of such events.
