Whereas lexical combinatorics has been widely investigated in a number of languages (fi rst and foremost English) from both a lexicological and a lexicographic viewpoint, the Italian language is still lagging behind in this respect. The paper illustrates the objectives, characteristics and state of the art of the CoP-It project, which aims at creating an online resource endowed with: a) a database of Italian word combinations (intended as a complex set of expressions characterized by different degrees of fixity and familiarity) extracted from corpora; b) and an interface for simple and advanced searches with a dedicated query language.