The Himalayan Cedar of the Rizzoli

This cedar grows in the garden of a working orthopaedic hospital, on ground that has already been a monastery, a royal residence and a public park before it became a place of medicine. San Michele in Bosco started as an Olivetan monastery rebuilt in 1437, later served briefly as Villa Reale when King Victor Emmanuel II stayed there around Italian unification in 1860, and only became a hospital in 1896, when the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli opened here in the presence of Italy's royal family, funded by a bequest from the surgeon Francesco Rizzoli. The cedar, planted around that same transition, has reached nearly 30 metres, its trunk 520cm around, standing in a garden landscaped specifically to frame the new medical facility when it opened. Himalayan cedar, native to high-altitude forests stretching from Afghanistan to Nepal, was a fashionable choice for grand Italian institutional gardens of the period, valued for its size and its distinctive drooping branch tips, and this specimen has had well over a century to earn its place on Italy's official monumental tree register.