Il Sacerdote

For years, gardeners in Porta Venezia's park called this tree a metasequoia and had the genus wrong before anyone checked properly. It is in fact a bald cypress, one of the first ever planted in Milan, native to the swamps of the American South rather than to any part of Italy, and one of very few conifers anywhere that drops its needles for winter, the trait that gives the whole species its English name. Standing roughly 35 metres tall with a trunk 6.2 metres around, it grows at the edge of the artificial lake inside the Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli, Milan's oldest public park, opened in 1784 on land a Habsburg duke gave up for prisoners to landscape. Other cypresses share its stretch of water, but this is the tallest and widest of the whole stand, the reason the Milanese writer and forest scholar Tiziano Fratus nicknamed it Il Sacerdote, the priest, for the way its bare winter branches spread like a robe. Its roots, like those of every bald cypress in wet ground, throw up woody knees above the waterline to breathe, a feature visitors often mistake for stumps. At around 156 years old it predates the park's nineteenth century English-garden makeover and has outlasted the zoo that once shared these grounds, dismantled in 1992.