The cognitive nature of metaphor gives life to idioms of everyday usage. Although the mechanism of metaphorical mapping is considered to be universal, speech communities make use of idioms that may present diverging semantic and formal features. This lack of correspondence can be explained by assuming that language is influenced not only by the bodily and day-to-day scope of our existence, but also by values and symbols which can vary significantly from one culture to another. As a result, the aim of this work is to present a conceptual and contrastive analysis of a corpus of Italian and Spanish idioms which express three target domains: sadness, joy and love.