This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on changes in Italian men's earnings inequality since the late 1970s by decomposing the earnings autocovariance structure into its long-term and transitory parts. Cross-sectional earnings differentials grew over the period and the longitudinal analysis shows that such growth was determined by the long-term earnings component. Using parameter estimates to analyze low-pay probabilities shows that low-pay persistence and the probability of repeated low-pay episodes grew for all birth cohorts during the early 1990s. Moreover, long-term heterogeneity is found to characterize the earnings distribution of nonmanual workers, accounting for a large part of overall heterogeneity.