Book excerpt: Following crucial insights on the functional structure of the clause and recent developments within the cartographic projects and minimalism, this book addresses various central themes in Italian and Romance syntax ranging from verb syntax and the syntax of verb-related phenomena of agreement and cliticization, to word order issues and their status in discourse contexts. It illustrates a research program where the basic formal components of grammar, the rich cartographic syntactic structures, are directly implicated in morphosyntactic computations proper as well as in the articulation of discourse strategies.