Etymological dictionaries

Thank you for the information. I'll have a look for these in May, when I will be in Lucca.

As Pacentro says, any decent monolingual Ital dictionary will give you an idea of etymology.  There are many good etymological dictionaries around and these are not costly as there are paperback editions. I recommend the Mondadori.

  Hi, Just to let you know, that there is a decent source online: http://www.etimo.it/ I often use it for translation work. If you need to conjugate italian verbs, I can recommend: http://coniuga.com/ But there are other good online resources, you may especially look at the dictionaries on the websites: Alice, Corriere della Sera, La Reppublica. The overall IT dictionary for translators is IATE, Interactive Terminology for Europe, but since it is a working instrument for specialist translators, you may not find simple words in it. Have fun :-)