The focus of this study is on temporal organization, specifically of vowel duration, in stressed syllables in (standard) Italian. We investigate possible compression effects on the duration of stressed vowels according to wordposition (final, penult and antepenult) and syllable type (open vs. closed) in this language. Our results show predicted shortening in some contexts, e.g. closed syllables, and antepenultimate position, but not in all tested contexts. Compression effects do not surface in a fully linear fashion, with complications arising in word-final position where competing tendencies towards lengthening and shortening are found to co-occur.