If you're Italian and you like (digitally) flipping through archives page by page...
...DO I HAVE A WEBSITE FOR YOU!
The Italian Government has been hard at work digitizing many of their birth, marriage, and death records. Their portal Antenati has a search function, but it only works for certain areas within certain years. For the real fun, you gotta go to Sfoglia i registri.
That's where the real magic happens.
Here you can click on the province from which your ancestor hailed, then the era you wish to search. Your options are:
-Stato civile napoleonico: The Napoleonic era. Generally these records will stretch from roughly 1809-1815ish.
-Stato civile della restaurazione: The period during the struggle for unification and the early days of unified Italy. Generally, these records date between 1816 and 1860, though you'll find much later records under "stato civile della restaurazione" for some towns. (Example: Garaguso in the Archives of Matera.)
-Stato civile italiano: Italy was unified officially in 1861. This period extends from 1861-1945, though many of the later records are currently unavailable digitally.
Once you've picked your era, you can pick your town, and then the type of record you'd like. Some places have tons digitized, some have only a few things. Generally, you'll have some combination of births, marriages, deaths, and/or some related supporting material (like marriage banns). Once you've selected your record type, you click on the year, and then you have the ability to look through each image uploaded.
I'm not going to lie: it's arduous work. The handwriting can be hard. But when you come across a birth record or a marriage record for someone you've been looking for, it feels like you've gotten to meet someone for the first time.
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