First Published in 2002. The Italian phenomenon known as raddoppiamento sintattico, or sometimes raddoppiamento fonosintattico, has received a vast amount of attention. Long recognized in Italian grammar books, the process consists of the gemination of a word-initial consonant in certain environments. The word raddoppiamento means doubling, and it is deemed syntactic or phonosyntactic because the process spans word boundaries. This offers a synchronic and diachronic cross-dialectical study of this phenomenon.