Palermo grows one species obsessively. Ficus macrophylla, the Moreton Bay fig, arrived from Australia in the 19th century and found a climate it liked even better than home, filling the city's villas and squares with trees whose aerial roots thicken into trunks of their own. The most famous, in Piazza Marina, is currently fighting a fungal infection that has cost it half its canopy. Its own parent tree still thrives quietly in the Botanical Garden nearby. Between the two: a fig turned into a murdered judge's memorial, two rare dragon trees, and a palm avenue inside Italy's first public garden.
0 / 21 visitados en Palermo
Foto: Margherito1 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Ficus of Piazza Marina
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 162 years · Kalsa
Half of Palermo's most famous tree is dying. A fungal infection has spread through roughly half the plant since 2016, drying out aerial roots and dropping branches in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and the city is still working out whether it can be saved. None of that undoes what is already there: a Ficus macrophylla planted around 1863 or 1864 in a garden laid out on the site of Inquisition executions, 188 people burned or garrotted in the same square over two centuries. The mayor who had it planted, the Marchese di Rudini, was marking the end of Bourbon rule after Garibaldi's arrival, and the tree later earned a second civic title, Tree of the 150 Years of Italian Unity, in 2011. Its trunk system has spread into a thicket of secondary trunks and aerial roots so dense that sources disagree on the real measurement, some citing a 20 metre circumference and others 36, depending on whether they are measuring the original trunk or the whole colonnaded mass it has since become. That confusion is itself the point: a fig this size stops being one trunk and starts being a small forest sharing one root system. Palermo's arborists are now doing what any city does for an ageing landmark, propping, monitoring and hoping the fungus loses before the tree does.
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Foto: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Falcone Tree
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 90 years · Libertà
This fig has been Palermo's memorial wall for over three decades. On 23 May 1992 a mafia car bomb killed judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, and three bodyguards on the motorway into the city. Within days strangers began taping messages, photographs and poems to the trunk of the Ficus macrophylla outside his apartment building, and they have never really stopped. Palermitans call it l'Albero della Speranza, the Tree of Hope. The building itself is an unremarkable 1960s apartment block on a residential street, which is part of what makes the tree's transformation so complete: nobody would look twice at Via Notarbartolo without it. The city has since listed it as a protected cultural asset, and in 2023 a local council motion proposed a flowerbed specifically to stabilise its roots after arborists flagged structural risk, work that has continued with pruning and monitoring since. Every 23 May the covering paper and messages are renewed for the anniversary. The tree itself is roughly 90 years old, planted decades before anyone could have guessed what it would come to hold, which makes it older than the massacre it now stands for by about half a century.
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Foto: Giuseppe ME (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Ficus of the Orto Botanico
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 181 years · Kalsa
The most famous fig tree in Palermo is not the one in Piazza Marina, it is that tree's parent. Planted in the Orto Botanico in 1845, this Ficus macrophylla has spent 180 years building a canopy now measured at roughly 3,000 square metres, reportedly the largest crown of any tree in Europe, spread across 44 secondary trunks that grow down from the branches as aerial roots and thicken into full columns once they reach the ground. In 2023 it placed fourth in the European Tree of the Year contest after winning Italy's own national vote first, on the strength of more than 10,000 European votes. The garden's own records tie it directly to its more famous relative across town: the Piazza Marina fig was grown from a cutting taken off this one. Visiting means paying the botanical garden's standard entry fee, unlike its free offspring in the public square, but it buys a walk underneath a structure that no longer reads as a single tree so much as a roofed courtyard built from one root system. The species, native to Australia's Lord Howe Island and the Queensland coast, has now been growing on this one plot for longer than Italy has existed as a unified country.
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Foto: FrankAdamo, via Wikimedia Commons (Wiki Loves Monuments) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Dragon Tree of Villa Malfitano
Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco) · approximately 140 years · Libertà
This tree bleeds, or its close relatives do: cut into a dragon tree's bark and the sap that runs out is dark red, sold for centuries across Europe as sangue di drago, dragon's blood, a dye and wound treatment. Palermo's own specimen, a Dracaena draco with a trunk just under six metres around, grows in the private botanical garden the Whitaker family built around their villa in the 1880s. The Whitakers had made their fortune in Marsala wine, the fortified wine Joseph Whitaker's grandfather helped turn into a British staple, and Joseph spent part of it hiring the botanist Emilio Kunzmann to fill the grounds with plants gathered from Tunisia, Sumatra and Australia rather than the classical statuary a Sicilian villa garden usually got. The dragon tree, native to the Canary Islands and Macaronesia rather than anywhere the family's ships actually sailed, was one specimen among that collection, assembled for curiosity rather than status. Its crown has since branched into the tiered, umbrella-like shape the species only reaches after decades of growth, each segment ending in a burst of stiff blue green leaves. No record survives of the exact planting date, only that it arrived with the rest of Kunzmann's garden. The park is free to walk; only the villa's interior charges for a guided tour.
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5
The Dragon Tree of the Palazzina Cinese
Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco) · approximately 136 years · Favorita
A Bourbon king built a Chinese pavilion in Sicily, and the dragon tree standing in front of it has outlasted every reason he had for doing so. Ferdinand III commissioned the Palazzina Cinese in 1799 from architect Venanzio Marvuglia as a retreat inside what became Parco della Favorita, part of a broader taste for chinoiserie that swept European royal courts with no particular logic attached to Sicily specifically. This Dracaena draco, about 136 years old, is the largest of several dragon trees planted around the building, its trunk now measuring six metres around and its condition tracked as good in Italy's own national tree register. The palazzina itself has been restored and reopened to the public after long closures, and the tree stands in the section of the Favorita that has always stayed open regardless, a royal hunting park turned public one generations ago. Joggers and tourists pass it daily without necessarily clocking that it predates the pavilion's current public opening by over a century, and that dragon trees like this one only flower, then branch, after decades of growth, which means this specimen's entire visible shape is a record of exactly how long it has already stood here.
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Foto: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Ficus of Villa Trabia
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · undated, likely planted in the late 19th century · Libertà
A single 1910 inventory of Villa Trabia's grounds recorded 2,790 plant species on one aristocratic estate, and one of the Ficus macrophylla planted for that collection is still standing, its trunk now nearly five metres around. The villa belonged to the Lucchesi Palli family, princes of Campofranco, who built it in the 18th century and spent the following hundred years turning the grounds into one of Palermo's most serious private botanical collections before the city eventually took the park over as public land. Roughly twenty other fig trees share the grounds today, descendants and companions from the same planting era, but this one's circumference sets it apart from the rest. The villa building itself now houses a municipal office and a public library, an unglamorous second act for grounds a prince once filled with rarities gathered from across the world for no reason beyond having them. The park was renamed in 2024 for Ninni Cassara, a police officer killed by the mafia in 1985, giving Villa Trabia the same layered history as Palermo's Falcone tree across town: a garden built for private pleasure now doubling as memorial ground. Open daily, free, no ticket required to stand beneath it.
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Foto: Diego Gelvis (CC BY-SA 4.0)
7
The Date Palm of Villa Bonanno
Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera) · approximately 120 years · Albergheria
Underneath this palm garden's soil sits a Roman house with a mosaic of Alexander the Great hunting a lion, uncovered by accident in the 19th century and left exactly where it was found. Villa Bonanno, laid out in 1905 in front of the Norman Palace that still seats Sicily's regional parliament, was built specifically to show off both: the archaeology below and roughly 400 date palms imported directly from Tunisia to fill the ground above it, reportedly the largest concentrated planting of Phoenix dactylifera anywhere in Europe. This specimen, measured at up to 2.5 metres around, stands among the mature survivors of that original planting, in a square that has spent 900 years as the political centre of Sicily under Normans, Spanish viceroys and now the regional government. The garden's designer, Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda, also built a small caretaker's house on site in the same period, one of the few original 1905 structures that survived a 2013 EU funded renovation covering three of Palermo's historic squares. The garden stays open around the clock, unfenced, a rare case of a European capital's most politically important square doubling as an all hours public park rather than a monument viewed from behind railings.
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Foto: Dedda71 (CC BY 3.0)
8
The Palm Avenue of Villa Giulia
Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia robusta) · undated, planted in a 19th century garden expansion · Kalsa
Villa Giulia opened in 1778, which makes it, by most accounts, Italy's first public garden, decades before Rome, Florence or Milan opened anything comparable to ordinary citizens rather than nobility. Goethe visited in 1787 and called it the most stupendous place in the world, high praise from a man who had just finished touring the rest of the country. The garden's original 18th century layout, designed by Nicolo Palma with sculptures by Ignazio Marabitti, predates the entrance avenue most visitors actually remember: a colonnade of Washingtonia robusta, Mexican fan palms, planted along Via Lincoln when the garden expanded in the 19th century, tall enough now that walking the avenue means walking in dappled shade for its entire length regardless of the hour. The species is native to the Sonoran Desert, about as far from Sicily's climate zone as Mexico's coast, and it has thrived here since being introduced across southern Europe as an ornamental import. At the garden's centre, a marble sundial built to a 1784 design by the mathematician Lorenzo Federici still stands beside a fountain sculpted by Marabitti, both older than the palms that now frame the walk toward them. Free, open daily, still doing the job it was built for in 1778.
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Foto: FrankAdamo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Fig of Villa Malfitano
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 138 years · Libertà
When Delia Whitaker was buried, her funeral carriage was asked to stop under this tree. She was the last of the family to live at Villa Malfitano, and she had spent her life pausing beneath this fig, a daily habit the household knew well enough to build into the day she left the house for the last time. The tree was planted in 1888 by her father, Joseph Whitaker, known in the family as Pip, in the years he was stocking the grounds with plants gathered from well outside Sicily. It is the specimen closest to the house, and it grows the way the species does when nothing crowds it, long horizontal branches running out parallel to the ground rather than climbing, until the tree reads as a low green ceiling instead of a column. Italy's national register of monumental trees measures its trunk system at twenty-one metres around. The Italian gardens association, which keeps its own record of this place, describes it as second in size only to the famous specimen in Palermo's botanical garden, a comparison worth reporting as theirs rather than repeating as ours, since the city's big figs are measured by different people using different methods. The garden is free to walk. Only the villa's interior charges, and only for a guided tour.
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10
The Fig of Villa Tasca
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · not documented, likely dating to the garden's Romantic-era expansion from 1855 · Villa Tasca / Passo di Rigano
Italy's national register of monumental trees puts this fig's trunk system at twenty-seven metres around and the tree itself at thirty metres tall. Resist doing anything with that number. Palermo's big figs are measured in different ways by different people, some on the original trunk and some on the whole colonnade of secondary trunks and aerial roots that a Ficus macrophylla eventually becomes, and the botanical garden's giant is usually described by the area of its canopy rather than by any girth at all. So the defensible statement is the register's own measurement, not a ranking. What the tree does in the garden is easier to describe. It stands over the Lago dei Cigni, the swan lake in the grounds of Villa Tasca, and one Italian garden survey puts it plainly: the sprawling fig dominates half the lake with its permanent shade. Nobody has published a planting date. The garden was remade in the Romantic style from 1855 by Lucio Tasca and extended again from 1870 with English landscape additions, which is the period this tree most plausibly belongs to, and that is as far as the evidence runs. The grounds reopened to the public as the Parco di Villa Tasca in 2020. Entry is ticketed, it sits out on the ring road toward Monreale rather than in the historic centre, and the hours are worth confirming before you go.
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11
The Queensland Pine of Villa Trabia
Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii) · Libertà
A bunya pine drops cones that weigh as much as a bowling ball. Araucaria bidwillii comes from Queensland, where the fruiting season is fenced off for exactly that reason, and Palermo planted one anyway in the garden of Villa Trabia.
The garden is the story around it. Between 1886 and 1903 the head gardener Vincenzo Ostinelli turned the grounds into a giardino romantico stuffed with exotics: araucarias, palms, conifers, ornamental figs. An inventory he compiled in 1910 counted 2,790 plant species in the park. Roughly 150 of them are still there. Nobody recorded which year this pine went in, so it may or may not date from that planting, and the register does not say either.
What is measured is the trunk, 2.22 metres round, which for this species is a mature tree rather than an old one. The bunya's shape is the reason to look up: a straight column with the branches gathered into distinct tiers and turned up at the ends, like a candelabra that has been left out in the weather.
The garden opens weekday mornings only, which is worth checking before the walk, and it tightens the loop with the trees already on this page rather than adding another distant stop.
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12
The Silk-Cotton Tree of the Orto Botanico
Silk Floss Tree (Ceiba speciosa) · Tribunali-Castellammare / Kalsa
Palermo calls this one the drunken tree, and the trunk explains it. Ceiba speciosa swells into a green bottle shape and covers itself in conical spines, which is a defence against animals that do not exist on this continent, and it stands on the botanical garden's avenue of chorisias with several others of its kind.
It flowers when almost nothing else does. Big hibiscus-shaped blooms open through the autumn and into December, cream then pink then violet on the same tree, and the seed pods that follow split to release the silky floss the species is named for, once used to stuff life jackets.
The garden brought the species from Brazil around 1896, and the botanist Michele Lojacono Pojero recorded the first one growing in a Palermo garden in 1910. Neither date belongs to this particular tree, and no source gives it one, so its age is left open rather than borrowed from the species' arrival. Its trunk measures 3.8 metres round.
The Orto Botanico charges entry, which buys you one of the great nineteenth-century acclimatisation gardens of the Mediterranean, and this is among the odder things growing in it.
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13
The Yucca of Villa Malfitano
Giant Yucca (Yucca gigantea) · Libertà
This is a yucca with a trunk five and a half metres round. Yuccas are the spiky things in pots by a doorway, and this one has gone woody and enormous in the garden of Villa Malfitano, which is what a Palermo climate and a hundred-odd undisturbed years will do to a plant that is technically not a tree at all.
Botanically it is a monocot, closer kin to a grass or an agave than to an oak, and it has no annual rings, which is one reason nobody has put an age on it. The site already collects two dragon trees and several palms on the same logic: what matters is whether the thing is worth standing in front of.
Its name is unsettled. The register files it as Yucca gigantea and the city's own description calls it Yucca australis, which are names that have been swapped back and forth for the same plant. If you know which is right, tell us.
Villa Malfitano was built for the Whitakers, the English wine family who made Marsala and then spent the profits on Sicily, and the foundation that runs it charges entry to the house and garden both.
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14
The Dragon Tree of Vivai Lo Porto
Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco) · several hundred years · Calatafimi
Palermo's largest dragon tree stands in a garden centre. Seven metres round the trunk, which is half a metre more than either of the two already on this page, and it grows behind the counter of Vivai Lo Porto on Corso Calatafimi rather than in a park.
The nursery is the recent part. The ground it sits on was an eighteenth-century estate built for Monsignor Salvatore Ventimiglia di Belmonte, the last Inquisitor of Sicily, and a nineteenth-century garden of acclimatisation was laid out there long before the Lo Porto family started selling plants from it in 1960. The tree predates the business by a century at least.
How long before that, nobody has written down. One source describes the neighbouring horse chestnut as three hundred years old and the Sterculia as over 150, and says nothing about this one. Dracaena draco grows very slowly and lives a very long time, so seven metres of girth means several hundred years, and that band is as tight as the evidence allows. If you have seen a figure for it, we would like the source.
You walk in during business hours and nobody stops you, but it reads as a working nursery rather than a garden to visit, which is worth knowing before you go.
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Foto: Maurizio Moro5153 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Fig of the Giardino Inglese
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · Libertà
Eight metres round the trunk and eleven metres tall: this is a fig that spent its growth going sideways. It stands in the Giardino Inglese, the long public park Giovan Battista Filippo Basile laid out from 1851 as Palermo pushed north out of its old walls along Via della Libertà, and of the several big Moreton Bay Figs growing there it is the one Sicily's register of monumental trees actually measured, at 820 centimetres of girth and 11 metres of height. The park's figs trace back to stock raised at the Orto Botanico across town, which is where most of this city's Australian giants began. Ficus macrophylla behaves the same way wherever it is comfortable: branches send roots down, the roots reach soil and thicken into trunks of their own, and a single stem slowly turns into a colonnade. The garden around it has changed names along with the century. It carries Piersanti Mattarella's name now, after the president of Sicily shot dead in Palermo in 1980, and on a warm afternoon it is full of people treating it as a park rather than a memorial. Nobody has published an age for this tree. The Italian register has no age column, and no one appears to have dated this specimen. If you have seen a figure for it, send it over and we will add it.
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The Embracing Fig of the Giardini Reali
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · roughly 135 years · Albergheria / Palazzo Reale
A stone pine in the Royal Gardens is slowly disappearing into a fig. Over the decades this Ficus macrophylla has grown around a large Pinus pinea beside it and taken part of it inside itself. The Sicilian Regional Assembly, which occupies the Palazzo dei Normanni above the garden, describes the fig as embracing the pine. An Italian nature writer, less diplomatically, called it a deadly embrace. Both are looking at the same thing.
It is the largest of the three Moreton Bay Figs in the Giardini Reali, ten metres round and twenty metres tall, and the register that recorded it rates its health as excellent. Its age is a dendrological estimate rather than a documented planting: roughly 135 years, which in honest terms means somewhere between about 115 and 155. That leaves it younger and far smaller than the fig in Piazza Marina, which is the one holding Palermo's records.
What it grows on is the other half of the story. The Giardini Reali are a terraced garden on top of the walls of the Palazzo dei Normanni, the palace the Norman kings raised over the old city and which now houses the island's parliament. Against that the fig is a newcomer, and it is still the thing people stop for.
That is also the catch for a visitor. The gardens open on limited days around parliamentary business and charge an entry fee, so check the current hours before you cross town for this one.
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The Pecan of the Orto Botanico
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · Kalsa
The vine wound around this trunk is a houseplant. Monstera deliciosa is the thing sold in pots at knee height across northern Europe, and in the Orto Botanico it has been left to do what it does in the wild, climbing a pecan the way ivy climbs a wall.
The tree underneath is worth the look on its own. Thirty metres tall and 5.6 metres round, it is one of the giants in a garden full of them, and it belongs on another continent entirely. Carya illinoinensis is the pecan of the American South, a river-bottom hickory from the Mississippi basin, and it has put on full American height in a walled garden a few streets from the Sicilian coast. That is the point of the place. Palermo's botanical garden has spent two centuries working out which foreign species will take to this heat and this soil, and the answer here was emphatic.
It is easy to walk past, which is the usual fate of a tall straight tree standing among Australian figs that grow sideways and drop columns from their branches. Look up instead, and then look at what is climbing it.
Nobody has published an age for it. The Italian register carries girth and height and has no age column at all, and the local writing about the garden's giants describes this tree without dating it. If you know when it went in, tell us and it goes on the page.
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The Flame Tree of Vivai Lo Porto
Flame Tree (Brachychiton acerifolius) · over 150 years · Calatafimi
Sicily's register of monumental trees files this one as the Albero del fuoco, the tree of fire, and the name is literal. Brachychiton acerifolius sheds its leaves before it flowers, then covers the bare branches in small scarlet bells, so a big one in bloom carries down the whole length of the street. It does not do it in full every year, which is normal for the species and is part of why people remember the years it does.
This is a big one: 4.5 metres round, 20 metres tall, and described by Italian Botanical Heritage as over one hundred and fifty years old and one of the most important trees in Palermo. That is exactly as precise as the dating gets, and it stays there.
It grows in a plant nursery. Corso Calatafimi 262 was an eighteenth century estate belonging to the last Inquisitor of Sicily, then a nineteenth century garden of acclimatisation, and the Lo Porto family have been selling plants from the ground since 1960. The tree was standing here long before the tills were.
Eighty-five metres away is Palermo's largest dragon tree, also on this page, so one address gets you both. You walk in during opening hours and nobody stops you, but it is worth knowing that this is a working nursery rather than a garden arranged for visitors.
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19
The London Plane of Villa Tasca
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · around 200 years · Villa Tasca / Passo di Rigano
Italy has exactly one nationally registered monumental plane tree in Sicily, and it stands in the private grounds of Villa Tasca on the ring road toward Monreale, not in the historic centre most visitors see. The trunk is four metres sixty-five around, thirty metres tall, and a foundation that tracks Italy's giant trees puts its age at around two centuries, without publishing how they arrived at the number, so treat that as their estimate rather than a measured fact.
The tree stands 184 metres from Villa Tasca's other headline specimen, the sprawling Moreton Bay fig that shades half the garden's swan lake, on the far side of the water. Where the fig grows outward into a colonnade of secondary trunks that makes its true size a matter of definition, this plane keeps to one recognisable trunk and crown, plain columnar bulk rather than a spreading thicket.
London planes are hybrids, first bred in seventeenth century Europe by crossing an American species with an Oriental one, and they became the default street tree of nineteenth century cities because almost nothing kills them, not compacted soil, not pollution, not routine pruning. What makes this one worth the ticket price is rarer: on a whole island covered in ornamental gardens built by the same wealthy families who imported half the trees on this list, nobody registered a second one.
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20
The Cook Pine of Villa Tasca
Cook Pine (Araucaria columnaris) · Villa Tasca / Passo di Rigano
Villa Tasca's swan lake has a fig tree spreading permanent shade over one shore and a very different tree standing on the other: a Cook pine, thirty-eight metres tall by the national register's own measurement, growing in the narrow, leaning column that gives the species its slightly off-kilter look in photographs.
Araucaria columnaris comes from a single small stretch of the Pacific, New Caledonia's Isle of Pines, where eighteenth century European sailors mistook whole hillsides of the tree for a colonnade of stone columns and gave the island its name because of it. Palermo's specimen has travelled a long way from that coastline to end up leaning over a Sicilian swan lake instead.
Nobody has published an age for this tree, and no story about it should invent one. What is documented is the girth, three metres seventy, and the company it keeps: a Norfolk Island pine stands 35 metres away, a different species entirely despite the family resemblance, and the two of them frame the same lake that the garden's famous fig dominates from the opposite bank.
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The Norfolk Island Pine of Villa Tasca
Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) · Villa Tasca / Passo di Rigano
Thirty-five metres from Villa Tasca's Cook pine stands a second, easily confused conifer: a Norfolk Island pine, four metres eighty around, growing in the same lakeside garden. Both belong to the genus Araucaria and both come from small Pacific islands charted by the same eighteenth century voyage, but they hold their branches differently. The Norfolk pine keeps a symmetrical, tiered crown, layer stacked evenly on layer, while its neighbour grows in a narrower, leaning column. Once you know to look, the two are easy to tell apart from any distance.
It shares its garden with a menagerie of large ornamental cycads and the two other headline trees already on this page, the sprawling fig and the Cook pine, part of a Romantic era garden expanded through the second half of the nineteenth century by the Tasca family. No age has been published for this individual and none is claimed here.
Norfolk Island pines are a familiar houseplant everywhere in miniature, sold small and potted as an indoor Christmas tree substitute. Almost nobody who buys one sees what it becomes given an actual island climate and a century or two of room to grow: a genuine forest giant, capable of passing sixty metres in the wild, though nothing like that height here.
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