Italian society has changed significantly in the last decades, due to the passage from a traditional, mostly agricultural, society to an industrial and post-industrial globalised society.

Great relevance continues being attributed to the family as a fundamental social feature but, following the changes in society, even families have undergone important changes since the 1970s. These changes are indeed relevant, if compared to the traditional model of the Italian family – a patriarchal, mostly agricultural family with a large number of relatives living under the same roof, ruled by a strict hierarchical structure, in which men held the role of sustaining the family through work while, generally, women were supposed to stay at home and take care of the men’s needs and raise the children. This produced the stereotype of Italian women as angelo del focolare, literally ‘the angel of the fireplace’, the perfect housewife.

Today families generally differ greatly from this model: instead of a large number of children living in the same house with their spouses and children, plus parents and grandparents, since the 80s the Italian family has become much leaner, on average: just the two parents and one or two children. Parents usually work outside the home and mothers contribute to the economy of the family just like the fathers. Many families have just one child and some families are single-parent.

Another change may be identified in the loss of importance of institutional or religious marriage. While in 1972 420,000 marriages were celebrated, in 2009 only 230,613 people decided to get married and nearly half of them chose a civil ceremony rather than a religious one. Moreover, a significant part of the Italian population now decides not to marry, and instead couples live together as a husband and wife, and raise their children outside the traditional family model. Generally, however, there are much fewer births compared to Italian society of 40-50 years ago: while in 1967 Italian women on average had 2.7 children each, today they have only 1.4 children, a percentage that is below the replacement threshold.

This change in the birth trends is due to several cultural reasons, first of all an improvement in the access to education and working positions for women, together with the greater diffusion of contraceptive techniques, following a general liberalisation of sexual habits, but also a greater awareness in the importance of family planning. Moreover, the Family Law in Italy now recognises the perfect parity of husband and wife and their responsibility in ensuring the education and maintenance of their children. Not many families may be able to bear the costs of maintaining more than one child until they leave home, which according to Italian standards is very late!