The Holm Oaks on the Torre Guinigi

Seven oaks grow forty-four metres above the street, in a brick box of earth on the roof of a medieval tower, and they are the emblem of the city. The Guinigi were Lucca's ruling family in the early fifteenth century, when Paolo Guinigi held the city as its lord, and a tower crowned with trees already appears in Giovanni Sercambi's illustrated chronicle from that period. So the idea is six hundred years old. The trees are not. Holm oaks in a container do not live like holm oaks in the ground, and the seven up there have been replaced more than once without anyone recording when, which is why this entry gives no age. What the box does is keep them small. An ordinary Quercus ilex reaches twenty metres and these are shrubs by comparison, dense, dark, evergreen, with the small hard leaves that let the species hold a Mediterranean summer. Getting there costs 8 euro and 230 steps up the inside of the tower. You come out under the canopy, with the roofs of Lucca below and the Apuan Alps behind, which is a better arrival than most trees on this site can offer.