Purpose This work aims to study the break-even inflation rates (BEIRs), a widely used market-based measure of expected inflation. The authors focus on Italian Government bonds, one of the most liquid debt markets in the euro area. Design/methodology/approach The authors set up an auto-regressive distributed lag model and regress the BEIR on a set of variables that proxy inflation, market risk aversion, protection against deflation, credit as well as liquidity risk to get some insights into the importance of these factors. Subsequently, to disentangle market participants’ inflation expectations from their associated risk premia, the authors estimate a term structure model for the joint pricing of the Italian Government’s nominal and real yield curves, considering also a credit and a liquidity pricing factor. Findings The results show that BEIRs could be a misleading measure of the expected inflation due to the importance of the inflation risk premium and the credit risk effect. According to the estimates, the decrease of market-based measures of inflation observed in the last part of the sample period seems to reflect a lowering of both inflation expectations and risk premia. Inflation premia co-move with a measure of the tail risk of the long-term inflation distribution, signalling that investors become more concerned with downside risks. Originality/value This study complements the existing literature primarily based on the USA and euro area data focusing on the Italian market. To this end, the authors modify and adapt a well-known term structure model developed for nominal and real curves.