This paper aims to communicate a new conceptualization of persistent poverty used to build the class of longitudinal poverty indices by Mendola et al. (2011), and to show how these indices could be helpful in analyzing the characteristics of persistence of poverty in different age groups. The indices are based upon the idea that the longer the sequence of consecutive high poverty gaps is, the worse the situation experienced. An empirical application on European Community Household Panel data compares the contributions of age groups to the overall index in some European countries and allows to identify the strata of population more exposed to poverty persistence.