The Himalayan Cedar of Villa Ghigi

This cedar was planted by Callisto Ghigi himself when he first acquired the hillside property that still carries his family's name, and it now dominates the meadow directly in front of the villa, tall enough that local photographers treat it as the park's single most reliable subject. Villa Ghigi sits just outside Porta San Mamolo on Bologna's southern hills, opened to the public by the city in 1974 and now spanning some 30 hectares of former agricultural land, old orchard rows of cherry, pear, apple and fig trees still legible in the landscape alongside century-old beech groves and native downy oaks. The cedar itself has been measured at 159cm in diameter and roughly 24 metres tall, and shows visible lightning-strike scarring on part of its crown, damage it has carried rather than been felled by. Its position on the open lawn in front of the villa gives visitors one of the clearest unobstructed views of any single tree on this list, framed against the hillside panorama over Bologna's historic centre that the whole park is known for.