MILAN - The pain of Europe's economic crisis is being felt sharply by a new class of people: separated and divorced men who even end up on the streets as they struggle to keep up child support and alimony payments.

In Italy, where the phenomenon is perhaps most acute, it reflects a fearsome combination of forces as the four-year-old economic crisis meets the steady fraying of the social safety net and the slow-motion implosion of the Italian family.

For some separated fathers, the burdens become unbearable as they find themselves jobless or unable to make ends meet as their children, facing grim economic prospects themselves, remain dependent on family support into adulthood.

"Before, men who lived on the streets were vagrants, people adrift or drug addicts," said Gianni Villa, 25, who takes food, clothing and blankets once a week to Milan's growing legions of homeless.

"Nowadays you find people there because of the economic crisis or because of personal problems," he added. "They don't tell you they are fathers, because they don't want their family to know."

Franco, 56, who did not want to use his full name, left his native Puglia in April after his business went bankrupt. He said he traveled to Milan to look for work, in part to keep up alimony payments to his wife of 34 years, whom he is divorcing.

"In Puglia I was living day to day, but I couldn't keep that up forever," he said, adding that he was still supporting his daughters, who are in their early 20s but unemployed.

With no place to stay in Milan, Franco said he was "very fortunate" to meet a man at a McDonald's who gave him a blanket and showed him "the ropes of living on the street."

It was not long before he was sleeping under the portico facing Milan's stock exchange.

In Spain, court filings against fathers who have not paid child support have risen sharply since the start of the economic crisis. In Navarra and Galicia fathers have recently been jailed for failing to support their children. In April last year, a Barcelona judge denied parental custody to a divorced father, citing the fact that he had lost his job.

Poverty among single parents is "a rising phenomenon," said Raffaella Saso, who wrote on the "new poor" - separated fathers and single-parent families - for the annual report of Eurispes, the Rome-based research institute.

Homelessness, too, is growing. In Greece, Klimaka, a charity group, estimates that the number of homeless has increased by 25 percent in two years. It is a concern in a country where family ties have usually averted such phenomena. A third of those who had registered as homeless were divorced or separated, and mostly men, according to a study published in February by the National Center for Social Research.

In Italy, charities say that a growing number of those using soup kitchens and dormitories of churches and other agencies are separated parents. "An uncomfortable reality but easy to believe, considering that 80 percent of separated fathers cannot live on what remains of their salary," Ms. Saso, the researcher, wrote.

The Reverend Clemente Moriggi, who oversees the Brothers of St. Francis of Assisi, a Milanese Catholic charity, said that in the past year separated fathers, ages 28 to 60, occupied 80 of the 700 beds in the foundation's dormitories, which do not house children. That is more than twice the number of just a few years ago.

"These men," Father Moriggi said, "earned average salaries that only left them tears to cry once they paid their alimony and mortgages."

Androniki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens, and Raphael Minder from Madrid.

The New York Times