The Ficus of Piazza Matteotti

Twelve metres around the trunk. That is the largest girth Italy's national register of monumental trees records for any tree in Cagliari, and it belongs to a fig from the far side of the world standing on the square outside the central railway station. Ficus macrophylla comes from the coastal forests of eastern Australia, and at this size it stops behaving like a street tree. Aerial roots come down from the limbs, thicken where they meet the ground and fuse into a base with no clean edge to put a tape around. Local reporting puts the tree at 140 to 150 years old. The fence is the first thing a visitor notices. The city ringed the ground under the canopy in November 2025 as a precaution against branch drop, so you can stand beside the tree but not walk under it. It is not a sign of decline. A University of Sassari team assessed the trunk in January 2025 with a dendrodensimeter, an instrument that reads the density of the wood as it drills, and reported no risk of structural collapse and no damage from the building works going on in the piazza. In April 2026 the councillor responsible for the city's green spaces said the same thing plainly: the tree is healthy, and has been under continuous technical management since 2019.