Italy, a Southern European country with 60.8 million inhabitants, has the largest proportion of elderly citizens (aged ≥65) in Europe of 21.4%. The aging of the population is due to a number of reasons, such as baby boomers growing old, an increase in longevity, and low birth rate. Although international migration has increased in recent years, the addition of a foreign segment of the population has neither compensated for nor significantly curtailed the aging phenomenon. The impact of aging on the economic sustainability concerns the progressive reduction of the workforce, high incidence of pension spending in the overall resources allocated to welfare, recent reform of the pension system, and the growing issue of "non-self-sufficiency" in the elderly. Despite limited financial measures dedicated to research, Italy is conducting important studies on aging, both at the national and international level. Physicians and researchers in the field of geriatrics and gerontology are not only promoting quality of life in the elderly, and healthy-active aging, but also contributing to economic stability and social organization. Finally, nutritional and lifestyle habits-and their role in preventing chronic diseases-are the focus of the current international event EXPO 2015, with many sections dedicated to the elderly.

In this paper, we present a multidimensional fuzzy analysis of the levels and the patterns of poverty and social fragility of migrants' families, in the Italian region of Lombardy, in year 2014. Migrants' poverty emerges as a complex trait, better described as a stratification of nuanced patterns than in black and white terms; Lombard migrants are in fact affected, to different extents, by "a diffused sharing of deprivation facets" and cannot be trivially split into deprived and non-deprived. The paper employs innovative data analysis tools from the Theory of Partially Ordered Sets; compared to mainstream monetary approaches, this leads to more realistic estimates of poverty diffusion and eliminates some well-known biases of standard evaluation procedures, providing strong support to the use of partial order concepts and tools in social evaluation studies.

Italy and Spain, as countries of recent immigration and high irregularity rates, have struggled to adapt their statistical system, especially their population registers, to adequately reflect the presence of an increasing number of immigrants in their territory. The population registers of the two countries have adapted differently to these changing realities: Spain introduced significant improvements in Padrón which have increased its coverage and accuracy. This is still not the case in Italy, making it necessary to resort to non-random sampling methods. The paper discusses the methodological implications of these differences and evaluates different methodological solutions based on both random and non-random sampling methods in both countries.

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