Ormeggiamo vicino alla boa.

Ormeggiamo comes from ormeggiare, which means to moor, to dock, or to tie up a boat.

Grammatically, it is the 1st person plural form, so it means we moor, we are mooring, or we dock, depending on context.

Yes. In isolation, ormeggiamo can also mean let’s moor.

That is because the noi form used for we and the form used for let’s ... are the same here. So only the context tells you whether it means:

• we are mooring near the buoy or
• let’s moor near the buoy

Italian often leaves out subject pronouns when they are already clear from the verb ending.

So ormeggiamo already tells you the subject is we, and adding noi is usually unnecessary.

You could say Noi ormeggiamo vicino alla boa, but it would normally sound more emphatic, like we moor near the buoy.

Because vicino is normally followed by the preposition a when it means near.

So the structure is:

• vicino a = near to / near

Then a + la combines into alla:

• vicino a la boa → vicino alla boa

This kind of contraction is very common in Italian.

Here vicino is not acting like an adjective that describes boa. It is part of the expression vicino a, meaning near.

In this use, vicino stays in the fixed form vicino.

Compare:

• Ormeggiamo vicino alla boa = We moor near the buoy
• una barca vicina alla boa = a boat near the buoy

In the second example, vicina is an adjective describing barca, so it agrees with the feminine noun.

Boa means buoy.

It is a feminine noun in Italian, so it takes feminine forms such as:

• la boa
• alla boa

There is no special reason you can reliably guess from English; it is simply the gender this noun has in Italian, so it must be learned with the article.

Italian uses the simple present much more broadly than English does.

So ormeggiamo can mean:

• we moor
• we are mooring

If you want to strongly emphasize that the action is happening right now, you can say:

• Stiamo ormeggiando vicino alla boa

But the simple present is perfectly normal and often the most natural choice.

Here it is being used without an object.

So the sentence just says that we moor / we dock near the buoy, without explicitly saying what is being moored.

If you wanted to name the thing, you could say:

• Ormeggiamo la barca vicino alla boa = We moor the boat near the buoy

So ormeggiare can be used both ways, depending on the sentence.