It is commonly established that, among couples, the man is usually the eldest of the partners (age hypergamy). However, recent literature in developed countries has shown that patterns of age differences between spouses are changing, in favour of more homogamy, that is where partners have similar age and, in some cases, increasing hypogamy, that is where the woman is the older partner. The aim of this paper is to investigate further the phenomena, focusing on age differences between spouses in Italy from the end of the XIX century to the start of the XXI century. To this purpose, I collected historical data on the combination of the age of the spouses for various years between 1870 to 2015, available from the archive of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and elaborated the patterns of hypergamy, hypogamy and homogamy. Preliminary results confirm the general findings of previous international literature. However, tracing marriages back to the XIX century, it appears that the shares of hypogamous marriages in the recent years has not been extraordinary in history. The study also explores specific gender dynamics among second order marriages offering interesting insights to the subject.