Italians are marrying less and separating and divorcing more, while the number of couples who have decided to form families without marriage has more than doubled in the past ten years, according to a report by national statistics bureau Istat.
In 1972, Istat said, 419,000 marriages were registered in Italy, compared to 250,000 in 2005.
"This phenomenon is part of an overall change in society and must be taken into consideration along with the fact that today there are over 500,000 couples who have decided to create families outside the institution of marriage," Istat observed.
This latter trend was confirmed by Istat data which showed how children born out of wedlock were now 15% of the total, almost double the 8% recorded ten years ago.
Aside from people marrying less, Istat said, they are also marrying later in life.
Men are now marrying for the first time at an average age of 34 and women at almost 30, which is four years older than what their parents were when they first married, Istat found.
Church weddings are also on the decline, Istat said, with one out of three marriages, 32.4%, taking place at city hall in 2005 compared to less than 20% ten years ago.
The increase in civil weddings, Istat observed, was in part due to the rising number of mixed marriages between Italians and foreigners and second marriages.
Marriages between Italians and non-Italians in 2005, Istat reported, represented 12.5% of the total, compared to 4.8% in 1995.
On a national average, 7% of the marriages registered in Italy in 2005 were between an Italian male and a foreign female, while 1.8 were between Italian women and foreign men.
Second marriages, Istat added, today represented about 10% of the total.
Marriage trends in Italy differ from a geographic point of view, Istat reported, with civil marriage representing 43% of the total in the north, 35% in central Italy and 18% in the south.
The south is also where Italians married more frequently and younger, Istat added.
