This paper describes the main features of the Italian Metaphor Database, buing built at the University of Perugia (Italy). The database is being developed as a resource to be used both as a knowledge base on conceptual metaphors in Italian and their lexical expressions, and to enrich general lexical resources. The reason to develop such a database is that most NLP systems have to deal with metaphorical expressions sooner or later but, as previous research has shown, existing lexical resources for Italian do not contain complete and consistent data on metaphors, empirically derived but theoretically motivated. Thus, by referring to the Cognitive Theory of metaphor, conceptual metaphors instantiated in Italian are being represented in the resource, together with data on the way they are expressed in the language (i.e., through lexical units or multiword expressions), examples of them found within a corpus, and data on metaphorical linguistic expressions encoded/missing within ItalWordNet.