Can you walk between Genoa's remarkable trees?

Not as one walk, and the page does not pretend otherwise. The three trees in the old town sit two to four kilometres apart. The four at Villa Serra di Comago stand within sixty metres of each other but lie up the Polcevera valley in a separate comune, roughly thirty-five to fifty minutes from the centre. The two at Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli are a hundred and fifty metres apart and about fifteen minutes away by train, which makes that the easiest pocket to reach.

Why do so few of these trees have an age?

Because Italy's national register does not record one. It gives species, girth, height and position for every protected tree in the country and leaves age out entirely. Regional registers sometimes fill the gap and Liguria's does, which is how the Villa Serra hop-hornbeam has a figure of 160 to 170 years. Everything else here is estimated from trunk circumference and labelled as an estimate.

Are they free to visit?

Most are. The trees in the old town stand on public streets and in the courtyard of Palazzo Doria-Tursi, which is the city hall. Villa Serra di Comago is a public park with an entrance fee in season. Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli is a historic garden with a ticket, and the botanical garden inside it is worth the visit on its own.

What is the strangest tree on this list?

The fern-leaved beech in the city hall courtyard. It is an ordinary European beech that sported a mutation, so its leaves are cut into narrow ribbons instead of the usual oval, and gardeners have propagated that accident since the 1800s. In a stone courtyard in the middle of Genoa it reads as something not quite right until you look closely.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Genoa

Genoa is long and thin against a hillside, and its remarkable trees are scattered the way the city is. These ten sit in three separate pockets rather than one walk. Four stand within sixty metres of each other at Villa Serra di Comago, up the Polcevera valley and outside the city proper. Two more grow in the folly garden at Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli, fifteen minutes west by train. The rest are single trees in the old town, kilometres apart, including one in the courtyard of the city hall.

The Fernleaf Beech of Palazzo Doria-Tursi

Fern-leaved Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. asplenifolia) · roughly 100-180 years (girth-based estimate, no dated source) · Via Garibaldi / Strada Nuova, historic centre

Genoa's city hall has a beech in its courtyard, and its leaves are wrong. This is Fagus sylvatica 'Asplenifolia', a cut-leaved sport of the ordinary European beech whose foliage comes out narrow and deeply slashed, closer to a fern frond than to the broad oval leaf the species is known for. The national monumental tree register records it at 230 centimetres round and 21 metres tall, which puts its crown level with the palace's upper windows. Palazzo Doria-Tursi was built in 1565 for the banker Niccolo Grimaldi, passed to the Doria family in 1596, was later bought by the Republic of Genoa, and has been the seat of the city's government since 1848. The tree is far younger than the walls around it. Nobody has dated it: no source gives a planting year, and the 100 to 180 year range here is worked back from the trunk alone, so read it as an order of magnitude rather than a number. A courtyard planting from the municipal era would fit the size, but that is inference, not record. It stands inside one of the Rolli palaces on Via Garibaldi, the UNESCO-listed street of Genoese banking houses, in a courtyard that now also serves the Strada Nuova Museums. Turn off the street and it is there between the arcades, a lace-leaved tree in a stone box.

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The Poet's Holm Oak of Montesignano

Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · roughly 150-300 years (girth-based estimate, no dated source) · Montesignano / San Desiderio, eastern hills of Genoa

The civic group that runs computer lessons in this corner of Genoa named itself after a tree: Il Leccio di via Mogadiscio, the holm oak of Via Mogadiscio. That is what a neighbourhood landmark looks like when it appears on no tourist map. The oak stands in Montesignano in the eastern hills, near the church of San Michele Arcangelo, and both the national register and Liguria's separate regional list carry it, which is rarer than it sounds. They agree on 257 centimetres of girth and 15 metres of height, and the region records the reason for protection as historical, cultural and religious value rather than size. Genoese sources connect the tree to Camillo Sbarbaro, the poet of Pianissimo who spent his other working life as one of Italy's serious amateur lichenologists, collecting the lichens that grow on exactly this kind of old bark. We have not found the line or the poem, so treat the literary link as a local attribution rather than a quotable fact. Its age is unrecorded too. Italy's national register carries no age field for any entry anywhere in the country, so the 150 to 300 year span comes off the trunk and nothing else. Holm oak is evergreen, dark and hard-leaved, which means it looks much the same in January as in July, and it drops acorns sweeter than most oaks in autumn.

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The Holm Oak of San Pantaleo

Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · roughly 200-350 years (girth-based estimate, no dated source) · Prè, historic centre

This is the thickest registered oak in Genoa's old town and the least documented tree on this list. The national monumental tree register gives it 305 centimetres of girth and 12 metres of height at an address on Via di San Pantaleo, in the dense Pre quarter behind Via Balbi, and that single sheet is the whole of what is known. No newspaper piece names it, no park authority claims it, no photograph turned up. Searching the street name mostly returns the deconsecrated church of San Pantaleo over by Staglieno cemetery, which is a different building in a different part of the city. So the pin here is marked approximate on purpose. We have the register's coordinates, but nothing confirms whether the tree stands where a passer-by can see it or behind a courtyard wall at that number, and this quarter is built almost entirely of walls. The age, roughly 200 to 350 years, is read off the girth, because the register records no ages. A holm oak that thick in streets this tight would have been growing before the surrounding blocks took their present shape, evergreen through every one of those winters. If you go and find it, tell us what is actually there. That is the fastest way this entry gets better.

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The Great Camphor Tree of Via Romolo Gessi

Nepal Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum glanduliferum) · roughly 150-250 years (girth-based estimate, no dated source) · Cornigliano, Medio Ponente

One number makes this tree interesting, and the same number is the reason to be careful about it. The national monumental tree register lists a Nepal camphor tree on Via Romolo Gessi in Cornigliano with a trunk 734 centimetres round, about 2.3 metres through, and 24 metres tall. For comparison, the other specimens of Cinnamomum glanduliferum turned up around Genoa measure 487 centimetres at Villa Tigullio in Rapallo and between 350 and 392 at Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli. This one is half as thick again as the next largest, which makes it either a genuinely extraordinary tree or a digit that slipped in a spreadsheet. Only the register carries it. No photograph, no second measurement, no local article, which is why no superlative is claimed for it here. Nepal camphor comes from the Himalaya and southwest China, and it reached Genoese gardens in the nineteenth century, when shipping money was buying exotics by the crate and the western districts of Cornigliano and Sampierdarena still had the villa grounds to put them in, long before heavy industry took that shoreline. The age, roughly 150 to 250 years, is estimated from the trunk. The pin is approximate. Go and look, and if the trunk really is that wide, we would like to hear it.

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The Coast Redwood of Villa Serra

Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · roughly 120-170 years (girth-based estimate consistent with the park's founding era, no dated source for this individual) · Comago, Sant'Olcese (Val Polcevera, Genoa metropolitan area, NOT within the comune of Genova)

A Californian redwood 38 and a half metres tall grows in a valley north of Genoa, and it is not even the tallest tree in its own park. Villa Serra stands in Comago, in the comune of Sant'Olcese, up the Polcevera valley and outside the city boundary, roughly nine kilometres from the centre and reached by a bus or a train and a connecting bus. What the journey buys is the tightest group of monumental trees anywhere around Genoa: this sequoia and three others stand within about sixty metres of one another in nine hectares of English-style park. Coast redwood belongs to the fog belt of northern California, where the species grows taller than anything in Europe, and it arrived in Italian gardens in the middle of the nineteenth century as the fashionable import of the moment, which is also when this garden was laid out. That timing is where the age estimate comes from: roughly 120 to 170 years, reasoned from the founding of the park and from the trunk, with no planting record for this individual and no age field in the national register to consult. Its bark is the thing to put a hand on, soft, fibrous and deep enough to shrug off fire in its home range. The park was restored and reopened in 1992. It charges admission and closes on Monday mornings.

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The Turkey Oak of Villa Serra

Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) · roughly 120-170 years (girth-based estimate consistent with the park's founding era, no dated source for this individual) · Comago, Sant'Olcese (Val Polcevera, Genoa metropolitan area, NOT within the comune of Genova)

At 41 metres this is the tallest of Villa Serra's four monumental trees, taller than the Californian redwood standing sixty metres away, which is not what anyone expects from an oak. Quercus cerris is fast and tall by European standards, native to southeastern Europe and Asia Minor, but it usually tops out around thirty metres. Getting past forty takes shelter, water and a long undisturbed run, and a valley-floor park in Val Polcevera supplies all three. The register puts its girth at 378 centimetres. You can tell it from the pedunculate oak a few paces away without knowing anything about oaks: the leaves are stiffer and more deeply cut, the buds sit inside thin whiskery scales, and the acorn cups look mossy, wrapped in the same curled filaments. Villa Serra is in Comago, in the comune of Sant'Olcese, up the valley from Genoa rather than in it, and its English-style grounds date from the middle of the nineteenth century. The tree's age follows from that, roughly 120 to 170 years, an estimate drawn from the planting era and the trunk rather than a dated record. No source gives it a year, and Italy's national register has no age column at all.

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The European Hop-hornbeam of Villa Serra

European Hop-hornbeam (Ostrya carpinifolia) · roughly 160-170 years · Comago, Sant'Olcese (Val Polcevera, Genoa metropolitan area, NOT within the comune of Genova) · at its best now

This is the only tree on this list whose age somebody actually wrote down. Italy's national monumental tree register has no age column, anywhere, for any entry, which is why nearly every date on this page is reasoned back from a trunk measurement. Liguria runs its own regional register and that one does carry the field, and for this hop-hornbeam it reads approximately 160 to 170 years. It is a modest tree to be the best documented of the set. Ostrya carpinifolia is a small, unshowy relative of the birches that rarely makes a specimen tree at all, and park competition has drawn this one up to somewhere between 22 and 32 metres, depending on which register you believe. The two agree on the 256 centimetre trunk and disagree on the height, so both figures stand here rather than one. In late summer it makes the fruit that named it, hanging clusters of papery pale bladders that look like hops on a vine, each holding a single seed. Ligurian woodsmen cut this species for tool handles, cartwheel spokes and vine stakes, because the wood is heavy, hard and will not split. It stands with three larger trees inside sixty metres at Villa Serra, in Comago, in the comune of Sant'Olcese, up the Polcevera valley from the city.

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The Pedunculate Oak of Villa Serra

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 120-170 years (girth-based estimate consistent with the park's founding era, no dated source for this individual) · Comago, Sant'Olcese (Val Polcevera, Genoa metropolitan area, NOT within the comune of Genova)

The park's own notes point out that a pedunculate oak can live five hundred years, which makes this one, at somewhere around 120 to 170, a tree with most of its life still in front of it. It is already 39 and a half metres tall with a trunk 296 centimetres round. Quercus robur is the common oak of northern Europe and the timber that built its navies, and in a sheltered park it grows straighter and faster than it ever does in open country. That is what has happened here: this is a tall forest-shaped oak rather than the wide-limbed field version most people picture when they hear the name. The age is an estimate and not a record. It follows from the founding of Villa Serra's English-style park in the middle of the nineteenth century and from the girth, and no source gives this individual a planting year. It completes the group of four monumental trees standing within sixty metres of each other, alongside a coast redwood, a Turkey oak and a hop-hornbeam, which is more variety than sixty metres of Liguria usually offers. The park is in Comago, in the comune of Sant'Olcese, in the Polcevera valley north of Genoa and outside the city. It is a managed historic park with an admission charge, closed on Monday mornings.

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The Camphor Tree of Villa Durazzo Pallavicini

Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · roughly 100-180 years (girth-based estimate, consistent with the park's mid-19th-century creation, no dated source for this individual) · Pegli

Crush a leaf from this tree and your fingers smell of a medicine cabinet. Cinnamomum camphora is the source of camphor, distilled from its wood and leaves for centuries as a medicine, a moth repellent and the plasticiser that made celluloid film possible, and this specimen has reached 36 metres with a trunk 538 centimetres round. It grows at the edge of the lake in the park of Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli, which is not an ordinary garden. It was laid out in the middle of the nineteenth century by Michele Canzio, a set designer from Genoa's opera house, as a theatrical route in acts and scenes, complete with a Gothic ruin, a Chinese pagoda and an artificial lake you cross by boat to reach a temple. The camphor and the Cedar of Lebanon beside it are named together in the Ministry of Culture's own description of the park, which is a lot of official attention for two trees. The age is not documented for this individual: roughly 100 to 180 years is an estimate that fits both the trunk and the making of the garden, nothing firmer. Pegli is about fifteen minutes by regional train from Genova Piazza Principe. The park charges entry, closes on Mondays, and the full circuit runs to some three kilometres of path.

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The Cedar of Lebanon of Villa Durazzo Pallavicini

Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · roughly 100-180 years (girth-based estimate, consistent with the park's mid-19th-century creation, no dated source for this individual) · Pegli

Two trees from opposite ends of the old trading world stand together at this lake: an East Asian camphor and this Cedar of Lebanon, and the Ministry of Culture names both in its description of the park. The cedar is the smaller of the pair at 25 metres, with a trunk 320 centimetres round, and it is the one with the longer history behind it. Cedrus libani is the tree of the Phoenician shipwrights and of the Bible's building accounts, cut out of the mountains of Lebanon for three thousand years until little more than remnant groves were left, then replanted across European estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the grandest thing a landowner could stand on a lawn. That is roughly what happened here. Villa Durazzo Pallavicini's park in Pegli was built in the middle of the nineteenth century as a designed walk in acts and scenes, and a cedar at the water's edge is exactly the set piece such a garden reaches for. No planting record survives for this tree, so the 100 to 180 year estimate rests on the trunk and on the age of the garden around it. One caution for anyone searching: a different and larger Cedar of Lebanon grows at a Villa Pallavicini in Arenzano, twenty kilometres further west. This is not that tree.

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Frequently asked

Can you walk between Genoa's remarkable trees?: Not as one walk, and the page does not pretend otherwise. The three trees in the old town sit two to four kilometres apart. The four at Villa Serra di Comago stand within sixty metres of each other but lie up the Polcevera valley in a separate comune, roughly thirty-five to fifty minutes from the centre. The two at Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli are a hundred and fifty metres apart and about fifteen minutes away by train, which makes that the easiest pocket to reach.
Why do so few of these trees have an age?: Because Italy's national register does not record one. It gives species, girth, height and position for every protected tree in the country and leaves age out entirely. Regional registers sometimes fill the gap and Liguria's does, which is how the Villa Serra hop-hornbeam has a figure of 160 to 170 years. Everything else here is estimated from trunk circumference and labelled as an estimate.
Are they free to visit?: Most are. The trees in the old town stand on public streets and in the courtyard of Palazzo Doria-Tursi, which is the city hall. Villa Serra di Comago is a public park with an entrance fee in season. Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli is a historic garden with a ticket, and the botanical garden inside it is worth the visit on its own.
What is the strangest tree on this list?: The fern-leaved beech in the city hall courtyard. It is an ordinary European beech that sported a mutation, so its leaves are cut into narrow ribbons instead of the usual oval, and gardeners have propagated that accident since the 1800s. In a stone courtyard in the middle of Genoa it reads as something not quite right until you look closely.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Genoa? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
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Walk 4 of these trees about 0.4 km, 6 min on foot