I believe that each vowel gets its own note, unlike languages like English which are full of diphthongs and triphthons. You often find bisyllabic Italian words on a single note, and the singer has to know to divide the note in 2.
Perhaps it's just semantics, but I'd say you're conceiving this exactly backward. What you call "bisyllabic" is truly a diphthong. Thus, it is a one-syllable word which can sometimes be separated to go on two notes, as opposed to a two-syllable word which is usually combined to go on one note.
It sounds like a trivial distinction, but I believe that your concept of "the singer knows to divide the note in two" is a contributor to bad Italian diction among English speakers singing Italian -- and especially so among amateur singers (like the volunteer opera choruses I used to direct).
Comparing to a similar diphthong in English is instructive. Of course a singer needs to be aware that the diphthong in "joy" is really two separate vowel sounds, and if you've got a chorus singing it together on a held note you'll probably want to specify exactly where the "ee" sound comes in. But that's not the same as conceiving the word as bisyllabic. As soon as the singers start thinking like that, it's going to sound like "jo-ee", which is wrong.
A similar reasoning applies to Italian diphthongs -- not just the ones that have similar analogs in English, like ai, oi, au, etc., but even one-syllable words which look especially bisyllabic to anglophones, like tuo, sia, Dio, etc. These too should be conceived as a single syllable. If you've got "Dio" held out over a long note, you can't just tell your chorus "cross out the whole note and write in a two half notes", because then they'll sing it like two half notes. If the composer wanted that, he would have broken up "Di-o" and written in as two half notes. Sometimes they do split the syllable (as in Dennis's "ma-i"), but usually they don't. There's a reason they don't, and it's because the word is conceived as a single syllable.
It's a subtle distinction, and for many choruses you'll have far worse concerns to address, but it's still something that I'd like to see done right. About on a par with dentalized t's, I'd say.
By the way, a well-known example of "mai" as two syllables is the "giammai" in Stradella's "Piet�, Signore". Here the bisyllabification is deliberate.
mdl
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