The Cypress of the Monte alle Croci Steps

This cypress grows beside a staircase, on the pilgrim climb from the river up to San Miniato al Monte. The Via del Monte alle Croci is the stepped route that leaves Piazza Poggi and works up the hill to the basilica, which has held the highest ground in Florence since the eleventh century. Mediterranean cypress lines approaches like that all over Tuscany, planted for its narrow dark column and for a habit of outliving whoever planted it. This one is 21.5 metres tall with a trunk of 346 centimetres, which is heavy for a species that usually stays slim, and it stands about 250 metres from Piazzale Michelangelo, so the walk between the two takes no detour at all. Nobody has published an age for it. RAMI, a separate Italian registry, surveyed the tree independently and confirmed the same size. The comune's own history of the stairway records that a monastery superior had a double row of cypresses planted here in the 18th century to shelter pilgrims climbing to San Miniato, and calls this the oldest Via Crucis in Italy, real context for the row, though no source ties this exact trunk to that planting rather than a later replacement in the same line. Cupressus sempervirens means always green, and it is. The tree looks in January exactly as it looks in July, which is part of why this hillside reads the same in every season and why the climb is as good in winter.