Tutti frutt…a

Today I was in a bookstore, thumbing through Viva la grammatica!, a fine book on Italian grammar published recently.
I focused on the explanation of the plural. It’s strange how, sometimes, we do not pay enough attention to the particularities of our own language.
Italian comes from Latin and, although in most cases the Latin neuter gender has merged into the Italian masculine gender, many words have retained the plural ending in “-a”, instead of (or in addition to) “-i”.
Example: “ciglio”/”cigli”/”ciglia” ; “braccio”/”bracci”/”braccia” ; “uovo”/”uova” ; “dito”/”diti”/”dita”, etc..
Generally, the plural ending in “-i” is countable, while the one ending in “-a” is a collective noun.
The same goes for “frutto,” whose plural is either “frutti” or “frutta”.
The plural “frutti” is countable, then used if you want to specify a finite number of individual fruits; “frutta” is instead uncountable. Similarly to what happens in English with “fruit”. Probably the uncountable nature of “fruit” itself is just an influence of Romance languages like Italian.
About genders and fruit, it is interesting to note that in Italian the name of a fruit tree is always expressed with the masculine gender (“il melo”, “il pero”, “il banano”), while the name of the fruit itself is usually indicated by the feminine gender (“la mela”, “la pera”, “la banana”). It’s also true that other fruits have a male name: “il  mandarino”, “l’ananas”, “il fico”.
Many Italians use the term “arancio” to refer to either the orange tree or the fruit itself. Obviously this is wrong: “arancio”, masculine in gender, only indicates the tree (“what a beautiful orange tree!” = “che bell’arancio!”); the fruit, feminine in gender, is called “arancia” (“what a beautiful orange!” = “che bell’arancia!”).
By the way, unlike what many believe—including Little Richard, Pat Boone and Elvis Presley—the expression “Tutti Frutti” does not mean anything in Italian.
English speakers are led to believe that it means “all fruits”, because “tutti frutti” is a word for word translation.
In Italian, however, to express the same concept, you should say and write “tutti i frutti”, adding the article “i”.
Yet an Italian would say, more commonly, “tutta la frutta” 🙂