Plans are presented for conducting an epidemiological observational project which will pool the data from nine Italian field studies covering over 70,000 men and women aged 20 to 69 years, belonging to 52 population samples distributed in 13 different regions of the country. The main objective is to produce multivariate models for the prediction of all-cause mortality, life expectancy and selected causes of death as a function of some baseline characteristics. The entry examinations of the population samples were performed between 1978 and 1987 with the measurements of risk factors and other personal characteristics mainly related to cardiovascular diseases and other chronic conditions. They include a large number of anthropometric, social, biochemical, biophysical, clinical, nutritional and behavioural measurements, although only a limited subset of them is common to all the studies. The collection of data on life status, mortality and causes of death has already been completed for 45 out of the 52 samples, although for lengths of follow-up varying from 4 to 12 years. The systematic analysis of this data bank will be started in 1993.