Italy to measure costs of tattoos, men's shorts for price index

ROME (Reuters) - Italy will include the cost of tattoos and men's shorts in its monthly report on consumer prices, while fees for overnight berths on trains will be dropped, the national statistics office said on Wednesday. The country's national statistics office ISTAT adjusts the basket of goods used to measure consumer prices every year to better reflect what people are buying, dropping items and services that are no longer popular. This year ISTAT will measure the cost of vegetable-based beverages like soy milk, leggings for children, men's T-shirts, and electric drills. Used-car prices are now collected alongside those of new ones, ISTAT said. ISTAT will start including squash in a calculation that already measures cucumbers and peas, and it will now collect the prices of university lodging and dust mops. Because they are rarely used anymore, the costs of sleeping compartments and berths on overnight trains have been dropped. By contrast, the growing popularity of tattoos and shorts - which stylish Italian men never used to wear in cities - earned them a place in the new calculations. The prices of almost 1,500 basic products in 80 different Italian cities are measured monthly by ISTAT to compile its consumer price indexes. ISTAT compiles three different consumer price lists - a national index for the entire population, an EU-harmonised index and an index for single-earner families. The changes will be applied to all three. Prices rose 0.4 percent annually in January, the statistics office said on Wednesday. (Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Tom Heneghan)