The course will exemplify the productiveness of a typologically informed approach to data – partly already well known, partly new and, to an extent, revealed by the perspective adopted – from Romance dialect variation. Topics covered will range from phonology (vowel harmony) to morphology and morphosyntax (personal pronouns, enclitic possessives), gender systems to syntax (agreement). Space limitations prevent me from illustrating all subtopics in detail, so I will limit myself to two: one lecture will explore the theoretical consequences of morphological irregularities triggered by the cliticization (or the affixation) of possessives to kinship noun, comparing Italo-Romance data with those from languages of New Guinea and the Americas. Another lecture will discuss concurrent gender systems, showing that among the Italo-Romance dialects there are some for which two distinct gender features must be assumed, a situation observed in far-off languages (again, from New Guinea to the Americas).