The Bald Cypresses of Parco Marenzi

These two are American swamp trees, and they have been standing in a walled Bergamo garden for more than two centuries. Bald cypress evolved for the flooded bottomlands of the American South, where it pushes woody knees up out of the waterlogged ground to breathe. Both do it here, at the edge of Parco Marenzi's small artificial lake, which is about as close to Louisiana as Lombardy gets. The national register measures the pair separately, at 455 and 380 centimetres round the trunk, and lists them a third time as a single group; what a visitor gets is one destination, two enormous trunks and roughly 32 metres of tree above them. The park is a 9,000 square metre nineteenth century garden behind walls, and for years that was literal. It stayed shut while the pond and its water system were rebuilt, and reopened to the public in April 2026 after a 180,000 euro restoration. In May 2025, for Italy's national day of monumental trees, the city ran a guided forest bathing walk among them, on the reasoning that a bald cypress can live a thousand years. These two are barely a fifth of the way there. They turn rust orange and drop their needles in November, which is the only time of year a conifer this size looks dead and is not.