The aims of this work are to discuss whether there is an anomaly in the Italian pension system and, if there is, to investigate its causes and its influence on the future prospects of the system and on the debate on reform issues. In order to address these questions, we first provide an institutional and quantitative description of the main features of the current Italian pension system, highlighting the main changes from the recent past; we compare it with other European pension schemes in order to identify whether there are common/specific features; we then refer to the last projections of pension expenditure elaborated by the RGS (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato: Department of General Accounts) to show where the system is going. We finally conclude, summarising the main implications of our analysis and comparing more explicitly the UK and the Italian system, to see what lessons we can draw for the Italian pension reform debate.