The Twin Figs of Giardini Pubblici

The national register does not measure these two figs separately. It files them as an insieme omogeneo, a homogeneous group, which is how they read from the path: two Moreton Bay figs of much the same size and age, standing together on the avenue near the main entrance of the Giardini Pubblici. They are the quieter half of Cagliari's fig story. The park opened between 1866 and 1873 on ground the city had used for its bastion and its lazzaretto, which makes it the oldest public park in Sardinia, and these two went in early enough that published estimates of their age start at 140 years and run as far as 195. Nobody has narrowed that. The city's own pages and the local press cite different figures and neither has been withdrawn. In November 2021 the council put three of the park's trees onto the Sardinian regional list of monumental trees: this pair and the honey locust a short walk away. Regional money followed, earmarked for maintenance on the park's protected trees. What that buys is time. A Ficus macrophylla at this size carries limbs longer than most trees are tall, drops aerial roots from them and thickens the ones that reach soil into props, and keeping that structure standing over a public path is the whole job.