The Araucaria of Piazza Vanvitelli

Every other tree on this page stands behind a ticket gate. This one grows in the middle of Caserta's own civic square, free for anyone to walk up to, a Chilean monkey puzzle 330 centimetres around and 25 metres tall with the palace itself visible over its crown. Piazza Vanvitelli used to be the town's market square before it became a public garden in the late 1800s, planted in two phases and then reworked again in 1995 to recover the original specimens. Campania's own monumental register ties this tree's age directly to that first planting, putting it at over 200 years, among the oldest trees this city protects and one of the very few outside the Reggia's grounds. Araucaria araucana is native to the volcanic slopes of Chile and Argentina, its stiff, spiralled, spine-tipped leaves an adaptation against browsing dinosaurs that vanished tens of millions of years before anyone planted one in a European market square. It shares this square with a casuarina and a yew, both also on the region's monumental list, all three within fifty metres of each other on ground that costs nothing to visit.