The Cedar of the Righteous at Villa Bottini

On 25 April 2021 this cedar was given a name. Lucca's Garden of the Righteous, in the grounds of Villa Bottini, dedicates trees to people who sheltered others during the war, and this one carries don Renzo Tambellini, an Oblate priest of the Holy Face who from the middle of 1943 turned his community's house into the hub of a network that hid Jews and partisans, and who was later given the gold medal for civil merit. Two more trees went to two more priests the same morning, an incense cedar for don Guido Staderini and a plane for don Sirio Niccolai. The tree itself is the largest registered trunk in the whole municipality: seven metres round and thirty metres tall, in the garden of a villa finished in 1581 for Bernardino Buonvisi, a silk merchant who built it to receive delegations rather than to live in. Nothing dates the cedar, though the species only reached European gardens from the Atlas mountains of Morocco and Algeria around 1840, which puts a hard ceiling on it. The garden is municipal and free, and it is 300 metres from the botanical garden gate.