The Cedar of the Bobolino

Most of Florence's grand hillside gardens exist because the city briefly ran the whole of Italy. When Florence served as the young kingdom's capital between 1865 and 1871, architect Giuseppe Poggi was given the job of modernising it, and alongside demolishing the old city walls for wide boulevards he laid out a string of new parks on the hills above the Arno, of which the Bobolino, a modest wedge of public garden near Porta Romana, is one of the smallest and least visited. Its centrepiece is this cedar of Lebanon, now with a trunk over four and a half metres around and a crown just past 22 metres tall, standing roughly where Poggi's plan put it a century and a half ago. Italy's regional registry lists this cedar among Tuscany's officially recognised monumental trees, one entry in the growing tally of Florence specimens that has expanded from a dozen in 2020 to 29 candidates by 2026 as the municipality works through a backlog of overlooked trees across its parks. Unlike its more famous neighbour Boboli a few hundred metres away, the Bobolino charges nothing and never closes its gates, which makes this cedar one of the few genuinely monumental trees in Florence that anyone can walk up to at any hour of the day or night.