The Atlas Cedar of Parco Caprotti

Bergamo's own green space writers call Parco Caprotti perhaps the least known park in the lower town, which is a strange thing to say about a garden holding a 25 metre Atlas cedar, a sequoia and a ginkgo. The three arrived together. The grounds go back to the fifteenth century, but the planting is the work of Carlo Caprotti, an industrialist who gave the park its current layout around the turn of the twentieth century and stocked it the way wealthy Italians of that era stocked gardens, with conifers from other continents chosen for size. The Atlas cedar comes from dry mountain forest in Morocco and Algeria. Here it has 405 centimetres of trunk circumference and the flat, layered branching that the species only develops with age, close cousin to the cedar of Lebanon and often mistaken for it. Beyond the register entry the documentation is thin: one local green space site names it, and no newspaper or municipal page found so far does, so treat the garden's history as local knowledge rather than settled record. The tree itself is not in question, and neither is the way in. Parco Caprotti is free, open, and a short walk from Parco Marenzi, which makes the two of them half an afternoon in the lower town.