Mixed marriages have long been considered important indicators of social intergration of immigrants. In this paper, we study marital exogamy between immigrants and natives in 32 Italian provinces/municipalities using 2009 cross-sectional data. In particular, we study the diffusion of intermarriages in Italy focusing on the role of education. Literature shows that the educational gradient of intermarriages in Italy acts at two levels: the individual level and the group level.

In order to estimate who is more likely to intermarry and, in particular, the role of education on the probability of intermarrying we have estimated some probit models.

Our preliminary results shows that, as the level of education increases, the probability of being intermarried is higher and this resul holds also as we plit the sample by gender (with an higher gradient for women).

Further developments of this work will focus on the role of contextual variables (basically referred to the structure of marriage market in the place of residence of foreigners) on th probability of being intermarried in order to test whether the higher or lower presence of other immigrants (and, in particular, of immigrants of the same nationality of individuals) may affect the probability of exogamic marriage.