The strong effort in micro-level integration among different statistical sources together with the availability of an increasing number of administrative archives is determining a big change in the processes that the National Institutes of Statistics adopt to produce population statistics. The Italian National Statistical Institute, Istat, is planning a new design for the next Census round, based on a convenient integration of administrative data and surveys.

A thematic database has been created to study how administrative sources could improve the quality and information of population registers: sources integrated are official municipal population registers and Istat statistical population together with administrative archives from labour market, education, data on income and taxation.

The aim of this work is to point out how this integration of data in proper registers could allow discovery of new relevant information about population: clusters of individuals determined by patterns emerging when analyzing ‘signals of presence’ in different sources and their geographical distribution could be of great interest for population studies. Moreover, emerging patterns could be very useful to design population surveys and producing population counts: both for definition of statistical models to assess accuracy of population enumeration and for implement sampling frames, including Populations Census ones.