A. In this paper we establish an unbounded version of the integral representation theorem by Buttazzo and Dal Maso (see [BDM85] and also [BFLM02]). More precisely, we prove an integral representation theorem (with a formula for the integrand) for functionals de ned on W 1,p with p ą N (N being the dimension) that do not satisfy a standard p-growth condition from above and can take in nite values. Applications to Γ-convergence, relaxation and homogenization are also developed.