The Cypress of the Boboli Gardens

Boboli's most famous cypresses are the double row lining the Viottolone, the avenue that runs straight down the hill from the amphitheatre. This one stands apart from that avenue, its own listed specimen in Italy's monumental tree register, closer to the Pitti Palace end of the garden than to the avenue's cypress ranks. At 357 centimetres round and up to 30 metres tall, it is unremarkable in a garden that specialises in exactly this species and exactly this kind of size. What sets it apart is the paperwork: the Tuscan tree register calculates its age at roughly 375 years from what it calls a registered birth year, a documentary basis this page has not been able to independently verify, so take the figure as a considered estimate rather than a fact carved in stone. If it holds, the tree predates the Boboli that most visitors recognise, laid out under later Medici dukes through the seventeenth century, though nothing ties this specific trunk to any one phase of that construction. The Boboli Gardens began in 1549 as the Medici's private garden and only opened to the public in 1766. Entry now runs on the same combined ticket as the Uffizi and Pitti Palace, so this cypress is one of the easier stops on the whole Florence page to actually reach: a short walk from the Ponte Vecchio, inside a garden that gets crowded with or without a 375-year-old tree to look for.