The Bald Cypresses of Villa Ombrosa

Five swamp trees from the American southeast are standing 30 metres over a Modena suburb. Bald cypress belongs in the flooded bottomlands of Louisiana and the Carolinas, and it does two things most conifers do not: it drops all its needles every autumn, turning a foxy red first, and where the ground is wet it pushes woody knees up out of the soil around itself. The comune's 2015 monumental-tree census counts the group at five and notes the 30 metres. A citizen registry measured the largest of them in 2021 at 4.3 metres round. Nobody has dated them. The park was the country estate of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, the historian who died in 1750, and it would be neat to connect the two, but nothing does beyond the ground itself. The villa later became a medical facility, then a municipal park, and since 2019 it has also housed Modena's Casa delle Donne. They stand together in one small public park with entrances on four streets, no gate and no ticket, about two kilometres from Piazza Grande. Our pin marks the park rather than a single trunk, which is honest for a group of five: walk in and look up, they are not hard to find.