The paper investigates the prosodic parameters which can be considered as relevant for the detection of regional varieties in spoken Italian. On the basis of acoustic analysis of three Italian varieties (Rome, Milan and Catanzaro), a crucial role is recognized in scaling and duration. Besides these features, tonal patterns and local pitch range also came out as being significant in variety discrimination through statistical distances. The same parameters are found relevant in sentence-type discrimination within the same variety. Results allow us to consider prosody as an important source of information for developing an automatic model in the geographical recognition of the speaker.