LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "la città (f.)" in Italian?
lah cheet-TAH, with every bit of stress pushed onto the final syllable. In IPA: /la tʃitˈta/. The accent mark over the à isn't decorative — it's the only spelling clue Italian gives for stress landing on a word's last vowel.
Two syllables, cit and tà, with all the stress on the final tà — the accent mark is what signals that.
Listen: la città (f.)
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Sound it out
Ci before a consonant makes a straightforward soft "ch" sound, the i again silent and only there to soften the c, the same rule as in ciao. The doubled t that follows is held slightly longer than a single English t, and the accented à at the end carries all the word's stress.
Hear it in a sentence
Roma è una città antica.
Rome is an ancient city.
Listen: Roma è una città antica.
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"Roma è una città antica" places antica after the noun, the standard position for descriptive adjectives in Italian, matching the English order in "ancient city." The accent on città is a spelling cue English rarely gives this directly: it tells you exactly where stress falls, unlike an unaccented word such as ragazza, where the stress pattern just has to be learned or heard.
Città is feminine regardless of what the city itself might be named, which is why una and antica both take feminine forms here.
Where English speakers slip
The biggest mistake is ignoring the accent mark and defaulting to a more familiar English stress pattern, landing closer to "CHIT-ah." The à is a hard grammatical signal in Italian, not a stylistic flourish, and it always wins over instinct.
The doubled t also tends to get shortened into a single quick English t, losing the extra length Italian gives it. It mostly affects rhythm rather than meaning here, but it's one of the more reliable giveaways of a non-native accent on this word.