LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "allora" in Italian?
ahl-LOH-rah, with a doubled l held a beat longer and stress on the middle syllable. In IPA: /alˈlo.ra/. The o stays closed and pure throughout.
Three syllables, al, lo, and ra, stressed on the middle one. The double l is a real geminate, held at the ridge behind the teeth slightly longer than a single l would be.
Listen: allora
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Sound it out
Another geminate-consonant word, this time with an l, which is especially easy for English speakers to under-hold, since English never distinguishes single from double l within a word the way Italian does (compare "pala" and "palla," genuinely different words).
Hear it in a sentence
Allora, andiamo!
Then let's go!
Listen: Allora, andiamo!
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"Allora, andiamo!" uses "allora" as a discourse marker, more like English "so" or "right then" than a strict statement about time, paired with "andiamo!" (let's go!, the hortative first-person plural of andare). This is extremely characteristic of spoken Italian, where "allora" often carries little literal temporal meaning and instead signals a transition or nudges someone into action.
Learners who only know "allora" as "then" in a strict time sense will miss this very common conversational use, where it functions closer to a verbal cue to get moving or change topic.
Where English speakers slip
The most common mistake is under-holding the geminate l, collapsing "allora" toward "aLOra" with a single quick l and losing the doubling that, in other word pairs, actually changes meaning.
The other slip is stressing the first syllable, "AL-loh-rah," by analogy with English words like "allocate" that front-load the stress. Italian stress here sits squarely on the middle syllable, "lo," not the first.