The aim of this paper is to present imaginary personalities from oral and written literature who have found their place in Italian fixed expressions due to their character, specific circumstances, events or the things they have done or said. Most of the analysed characters in this paper are fictional, while some are associated with the most diverse stories and legends, mostly of unclear origin. If the analysed characters have been taken from a literary work, their creator is an individual and therefore a known subject. The creator of these characters can also be a collective author, and therefore an unknown subject. The characteristics of the protagonists in folk fiction and folklore have been created for a long time and they have been constantly attributed new meanings and language varieties. Although the subject of research in this paper are phrases of the contemporary Italian language, when it comes to these language forms, we cannot talk about contemporaneity in a narrower sense. Namely, due to their stability, these expressions represent a kind of antiquity, passed down from generation to generation through time and space. We will consider as contemporary those idioms which are recognizable in form and meaning in the language and speech of the XX and XXI century, and we will extract them from general and phraseological dictionaries and collections.