The endings of Italian nouns and adjectives fall into a few familiar classes. Just listing these patterns and their correlation with gender, however, conceals several systematic regularities, which are the main focus of this paper. A global reinterpretation of the Italian declension system is offered, relating nominal endings to the Italian morphological system as a whole. This allows a predictive account of the invariable pattern la ministro which has recently become a significant category in Italian noun morphology.