The Farnia of the Ippodromo

The tallest tree in Florence's largest park stands where racehorses used to run. This pedunculate oak, rising 29 metres above the western meadows of the Parco delle Cascine, grows on the site of the old Ippodromo delle Mulina, a trotting racecourse that operated from 1891 until Florence's city council reclaimed the disused land in recent years. The oak predates the racecourse by generations. It is one of only six trees the City of Florence has formally recognised as monumental in its own right, a status granted well before the municipality's recent push to catalogue dozens more candidates across the Cascine and its historic villas, a list that has grown from a dozen entries in 2020 to 29 by 2026. Its trunk measures close to four and a half metres around, wide enough that arborists estimate its age at well over a century without ever finding a planting record to confirm it. What is certain is its size: nothing else standing in the Cascine's 130 hectares, a park with its own dark history (Nazi occupying forces used it for a mass execution in July 1944, still marked today by a memorial stone), comes close to this oak's height. It grows at the park's western edge, past the horse chestnuts and the poplars, far from the joggers and market stalls nearer the city, exactly where a tree left alone for a century tends to end up.