Squeezing Italian dictionaries in search of citrus juice and fruit

Abstract Southern Mediterranean regions significantly differ from the northern countries not only for their climate, but also and foremost for the influence that the latter has on the landscape and the products that are related to it. Dictionaries should relate the lexical variation used to describe the variety of landscapes and their characteristics, thus reflecting the peculiarities of a given territory. This paper deals with the variety of citrus fruits that can be found in the Italian landscapes, with particular attention to the lexicographic treatment that they receive in both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, where a precise meaning is not always registered and the treatment of the superordinate agrume (pl. agrumi) is controversial: its taxonomic status seems not to be recognized and fully exploited in dictionary articles.