Conventional poverty measures, showing that poverty and inequality have increased in Italy over the
past fifteen years, are based on household income. The main drawback of this method is that it does
not include other non-monetary variables relevant for defining households’ necessities. It is now widely
agreed that poverty should be conceptualised as a multidimensional phenomenon, more related to the
standard of living of the person or household than to the simple inability of satisfying basic subsistence
needs. In this paper we propose to measure poverty in Italy by complementing income information
with non-monetary indicators. To this end a multidimensional poverty analysis is performed by using a
representative sample based on the first wave (2004) of the Italian component of the European Statistics
on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Starting from the concept of deprivation, a non linear
principal component analysis is applied to selected items in order to reveal underlying latent dimensions
to be interpreted as deprivation indicators. We then examine how such measures can be combined with
income measures in order to obtain a better identification of the poor. Finally we examine the overlapping
between the income poor and the deprived and provide an analysis of deprivation profiles. Our results
show that a more comprehensive poverty measure, combining deprivation criteria and income poverty,
leads to a different identification of poor people, compared to analyses based only on income measures