Most of Sicily's great trees are Australian. The Moreton Bay figs that fill Palermo's squares and Catania's main park were planted in the 1800s, when the island's gardens were filling up with trees from other continents, and in 180 years they have grown trunks 14 and 24 metres round and dropped aerial roots that thickened into trunks of their own. The island's truly old trees stand on Etna. The Hundred-Horse Chestnut above Sant'Alfio was put at roughly 2,200 years by Italy's agricultural research council in 2022, and earlier guesses ran to 4,000. This list runs west to east, Palermo first, then Catania and the slope of the volcano, then Messina. Every tree on it can be visited. Two ask for a ticket, the rest stand in public parks and squares, and where a number is a tradition rather than a measurement the entry says so.
Planted in 1845, and the parent of the fig on Piazza Marina. Its canopy is measured at roughly 3,000 square metres, reportedly the largest crown of any tree in Europe, carried on 44 aerial roots that have thickened into full trunks. Inside the botanical garden, about 6 euros.
Photo: Giuseppe ME (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Palermo's most famous tree, planted around 1863 in a garden laid out where the Inquisition once burned its victims. Since 2016 a fungal infection has taken roughly half of it, and the city is still working out whether it can be saved. Free, on the square.
Photo: Margherito1 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A street fig outside the apartment building of judge Giovanni Falcone, killed by a mafia bomb on 23 May 1992. Within days strangers began taping messages to its trunk, and they have never stopped. Visible from the pavement at any hour.
Photo: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A dragon tree with a trunk just under six metres round, in the garden the Whitaker family planted around their villa in the 1880s. The sap of this species runs dark red and was sold for centuries as dragon's blood. The garden is free, the villa tour is paid.
Photo: FrankAdamo, via Wikimedia Commons (Wiki Loves Monuments) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Planted in 1888 by Joseph Whitaker, and the tree Delia Whitaker's funeral carriage was asked to stop under, because she had paused beneath it every day. Twenty-one metres round. Seen only on the villa's timed tour, booked by phone.
Photo: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
One of the figs planted for an estate whose 1910 inventory counted 2,790 plant species. Its trunk is now nearly five metres round, in a park that is free and open daily.
Photo: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Eight metres round and only eleven tall, a fig that grew sideways. Of the several big figs in the Giardino Inglese this is the one Sicily's register of monumental trees measured. Free, daylight hours.
Photo: Maurizio Moro5153 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
About 400 date palms brought from Tunisia in 1905 to show off a Roman house found beneath them, its mosaic of Alexander the Great hunting a lion still where it was uncovered. In front of the Norman Palace, unfenced, open at all hours.
Photo: Diego Gelvis (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Fourteen metres round the trunk and a crown 43 metres across; on the published register figures only the botanical garden fig in Palermo is bigger in Sicily. What stops people is at ground level, where the aerial roots have thickened into buttresses. Free, in Catania's main park.
The national register puts this bunya pine at 45 metres tall, a second registry at about 22, and the second is the believable one. The trunk is the steadier number, three metres round. In the same park as the fig.
Photo: Ivan Ruggiero (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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What looks like three enormous chestnuts is one tree, its original trunk long split, the three stems 10.5, 23 and 23.6 metres round on a single root system. In 2022 CREA, Italy's agricultural research council, put it at roughly 2,200 years; older estimates ran to 4,000. Free, open all year.
Five hundred metres up the path from the famous tree, on private land but plainly visible from the path. One source dates it to roughly 1,800 years, another confirms only that it is over a thousand.
Photo: AusTitz (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Twenty-five metres round by the regional register's 2026 list, 14.5 by a local paper's tape in 2020, and one of the largest of its species in Italy either way. A reader in Messina pointed it out under its Sicilian name, 'miricanu, the American. Free, in the public garden by the port.
Photo: GodeNehler (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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