Among the resources developed in SI-TAL (Integrated Systems for the Automatic Treatment of Language), ItalWordNet (IWN) was built as reference semantic database, enlarging the Italian WordNet developed in the framework of the European project EuroWordNet (EWN). The Italian lexical database was increased, by introducing and codifying, besides the new grammatical categories of the adjectives and adverbs, a subset of proper names. In the IWN context, the subset of proper names represents a quantitatively limited portion, about 3600 synsets, but it may become a qualitatively important extension. The ever growing amount of non-structured information, stored in natural language, requires the availability of computational instruments able to manage this kind of information where proper names show a remarkable incidence in any types of texts. The work here presented falls in this context, taking into account the proper names, and is focussed on: i) encoding in the IWN database; ii) more typical uses in either proper or metaphorical and metonymic ways such as textual corpora evidence; iii) possibility of a well reasoned and structured enlarging of this data on the basis of the recent experience carried out in IWN. 1. Building the set of proper names in the IWN database IWN was first developed within the EWN1 project (Vossen, 1999) and then extended in the framework of an