Dative DPs have been the subject of considerable investigation in recent years, and display a wide variety of behaviours, which seem to be both tantalizingly connected and yet fundamentally distinct (Miller 1992, Sadakane and Koizumi 1995, McGinnis 2001, 2004, Anagnastopoulou 2003, Miyagawa and Tsujioka 2003, Cuervo 2003). Dative DPs, whether the dative itself is morphologically affixal or adpositional, can behave in some situations as if they are structurally Case marked, and in others as if they are fully structured prepositional phrases. In this paper, we propose to consider DPs in Italian which appear with the dative preposition a, detailing their various sub-species. In particular, we find that there is good evidence to think that Benefactive arguments, marked with a dative a are structurally and semantically distinct from Goal arguments marked with a, and we propose an analysis for each that draws the relevant distinctions.