tradition of normative dictionaries started well before the first edition in 1612 of the Vocabolario della Crusca, the first great monolingual dictionary of European national lexicographies. The framework in which that tradition developed itself was of course in line with the history of Italian: a literary language, used for half a millennium only by a few people and only as a written language, in a country that only late and through heavy difficulties has succeeded in achieving full literacy. This article describes the relationships of this linguistic history both with the prescriptive grammar norm and with the common usage norm, as far as these norms have been reflected in the more influential dictionaries of Italian language, from the early rise to their web-based evolutions in present-day Italian.