The book investigates one concrete compounding pattern in present-day Italian within a larger overview of Italian compounding. Various accounts and classifications of Noun + Noun combinations in Italian are reviewed, with special focus on the status of the lexical integrity hypothesis. The author sets out to propose an integrated approach to the Noun + Noun compounding pattern, rigorously based on large representative data sets that were extracted from the Italian web corpus ItWaC as both automatically and manually post-processed frequency lists. On the basis of such data, it is aimed at providing an account for the behaviour of various subtypes of Noun + Noun compounds.