The Cypress of Villa della Petraia

Only one trunk on Florence's register of monumental trees is thicker than this cypress, and it belongs to a Montezuma cypress. At 580 centimetres around, this is not the slim dark exclamation mark that Mediterranean cypress usually makes in a Tuscan view. It is a heavy old tree, and it stands in the garden of Villa della Petraia, a Medici villa about five kilometres north of the centre, open to visitors and listed by UNESCO with the other Medici villas and gardens. The Medici bought the estate in the sixteenth century and rebuilt it, and the terraced garden the cypress grows in came out of that work. The evidence is one entry deep. The national register carries the species and the girth, the comune reprints it, and neither publishes an age, so a tree of obvious antiquity has no date attached to it at all. It has the trunk of something that has been standing a very long time, and nobody has written down how long. Cypress wood barely rots, which is why it was used for chests, doors and coffins, and why old cypresses tend to stay structurally sound long after other species have hollowed out. That is the quiet advantage behind most of the very old cypresses in Italy, this one included.