The present paper provides a thorough study of some types of adverbial and adjectival phrases in Italian introduced by the preposition “da” (Eng. “from”) with the function of intensifying the meaning of the element to which they refer through a hyperbole. Examples are: “una vacanza da sogno” (in Eng., “a dream holiday”), “bella da impazzire”, (in Eng., “beautiful to go crazy), and “mi annoio da morire” (in Eng., “I'm bored to death). Some of these structures are highly multifunctional as they are able to modify different parts of speech (e.g., nouns, adjectives, verbs), but they can also stand alone, that is, as discourse markers. The study outlines a corpus-based classification of the different syntactic patterns and the semantic formats that are associated with them. The analysis also offers interesting insights for a description of the polysemic preposition “da” and for the study of the conceptual relationships that encode hyperboles. Finally, the last part of the work is devoted to a contrastive analysis among Italian, Russian and English, and represents a first attempt to identify convergences and divergences in the use of intensifying hyperboles between languages belonging to different groups.