The Moreton Bay Fig of Villa Mazzini

Which number you believe depends on where you put the tape. Sicily's register of monumental trees, in its list of July 2026, gives this fig a trunk 25 metres round; a Messina paper that walked the garden in 2020 made it 14.5. Both are enormous for a tree in a city park, and the paper counted it among the five largest Moreton Bay figs in Italy. About 2.6 metres up, the trunk divides into seven main limbs and eighteen smaller ones, and the aerial roots that drop from them have thickened into the wall of pillars that makes the base so wide, and so hard to measure. Villa Mazzini is the old public garden beside the port, and it holds three of these figs. This is the biggest, the one with the information board on a post in front of its trunk. Nobody has dated it. The paper calls it centuries old and leaves it there, and so do we. A reader in Messina pointed us to it with one word: 'miricanu, the American. The species is Australian; its relatives in Palermo were planted in the 1840s and 1860s. The register's name for it is plainer, fico magnolioide, the magnolia-leaved fig, for the big glossy leaves with a rust-coloured underside. Free, no gate, a few minutes on foot from the ferries and the cathedral.