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Starting from 2018, the population Census in Italy will abandon the traditional decennial ‘door-to-door’ enumeration for a ‘combined’ approach which will integrate administrative data and sample surveys. In fact, in 2012, the so-called ‘permanent’ Census of Population and Housing was introduced in Italian legislation. The goal of the ‘permanent’ Census is to produce annual data - replacing the previous decennial cycle - using information from administrative sources integrated with sample surveys. This will be done within the frame of Istat’s modernization program, whose focus is to integrate administrative data, create statistical registers and conduct supporting surveys, in line with the new organizational, technological and methodological model aimed at fully exploiting data already available. The new Census strategy will allow a significant reduction of the cost of the census, of respondents’ burden, and of the organizational impact on municipalities. The traditional Census in Italy typically reported a significant difference between the usually resident population and the individuals recorded in the local population registers. Now, at the end of every census/year, the differences between the enumeration count and the population registers should be analyzed by municipal officers and population registers should be updated and revised on the basis of the Census outcomes.