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Abstract: In early 20th century Italy, the questions of social sciences did not fit anymore with the classifications in use in official statistics, as long as the national statistical administration was going through a deep crisis. In this context, sometimes municipal statisticians resorted to the metrics and classifications elaborated at the international level in order to extract scientifically reliable information from heterogeneous administrative data. In practice, however, those metrics ended up showing they needed to be tinkered case by case, as shown in this case study by the alterations introduced in the classification of urban quartiers in different surveys, and by the different indicators used from time to time. The analysis of these inconsistencies and discontinuities makes possible to reconstruct the peculiar relationship among statistical methods,administrative procedures and the behaviour of surveyed individuals, which emerged in a specific urban context. The most relevant consequence of this peculiarity is the conventional value of the results: the numbers drawn from the surveys are finally useful only for aims that are consistent with the context in which they were collected and elaborated.