The Giant Cedar of Pedrengo

This cedar has its own lightning conductor. It stands alone in the middle of the lawn in a small public park in Pedrengo, a village about five kilometres east of Bergamo, roughly fifteen minutes by bus or car and not a walk from the city centre. Out on open grass at 32 metres by the national register, or 35 by the regional tourism board, it is the tallest thing for some distance, and somebody decided it was worth wiring rather than losing. Its root plate is fenced for the same reason. The trunk measures 683 centimetres round in the register and 720 in the tourism survey, which is measurement variance rather than a dispute, and either way it takes four adults with linked arms to close the circle. The crown spreads about 25 metres, and the leading tip droops over in the way old deodars do, a shape known as a stork's nest. It was planted at the end of the nineteenth century, which is as precise as the record gets, so somewhere around 130 years old is the honest figure. Three more large cedars of the same species stand nearby in the same park, unregistered and worth the extra two minutes. Parco Frizzoni is free, small, and recognised by FAI, Italy's heritage trust.