Abitare in Italia is a project born from the multi-year collaboration between the Department of Historical Studies and the Territorial Agency for the House of the Central Piedmont (ATC) the aim of which is to promote and develop a public debate on social housing starting from the history of public housing policy in Italy. In our country, since the end of the Second World War to the 80’s of the Twentieth century, public housing policy have favored the middle classes while the popular ones have found makeshift houses, have turned to the private market or have taken the residuals allowances of public housing. During those decades, there were several actors who described the urban housing condition in real investigations, to denounce the deterioration and inadequacy of housing, to verify the application of sector legislation or to present state and municipalities intervention plans for the construction and management of the building stock. Intellectuals and professionals have also carried out literary, cinematographic and journalistic surveys to tell the contradictions of Italian society in that phase of profound transformation of the Country. Thanks to these different looks on the house it was possible to reconstruct a precise picture of the housing problem, to distinguish the need for a home in the main urban areas of the Country, to measure the relationship between supply and demand and to verify the impact of public policies on the quality of the “living in Italy”.