ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a qualitative overview of urban poverty patterns in Italy and their regional context and attempts to verify empirically the outlined scenario and particularly the persistence of the north-south divide which underlies the model. It introduces the problem of the availability of data for poverty research in Italy, showing the intrinsic difficulties in this task and the need to understand the interplay between institutional intervention and poverty patterns. The chapter describes the institutional framing of social assistance in a selection of Italian cities and regions and their fragmented schemes as an example of Italian welfare benefits for people in a condition of economic need. It explores the description by showing how the main characteristics of people living the poverty line, defined by the Italian Government Poverty Commission, are linked to the patterns of social policy. The chapter illustrates the overall coherence of the Italian model of poverty by looking at it from different but complementary perspectives.
