This work is devoted to the study of the properties of the sound spectrum at the release of Italian stop consonants in vocalic contexts.The aim is to check if the amplitudes of the peaks in the spectrum can be used as acoustic attributes of the place of articulation of the consonants. This information is useful for defining an automatic algorithm which can discriminate among different place of articulation using simple data such as the values, in dB, of the maximum peaks in different frequency ranges. Moreover, different measurements have been performed (the spectra are computed at the release, averaged over 10 msec after the release, and using a smoothed spectrum) in order to define which measure retains more information about peak amplitudes.