The Holm Oak of the Cortile del Leccio

The courtyard is named after the tree. Not a saint, not a duke, not the monastery it belongs to: the Cortile del Leccio takes its name from the holm oak standing in it, and one look explains why. The tree is about 15 metres tall and its crown spreads roughly 30 metres, twice as wide as it is high, so it does not stand in the courtyard so much as fill it. The national register puts its girth at 2.7 metres. How old it is depends on who you ask. One Modena magazine gives it 120 years. The FAI listing calls it secolare, which in Italian means age-old and can be stretched from one century to several. Nobody has published a dated planting, so this page gives you the disagreement rather than picking a winner. If you know the answer, we would like to hear it. The complex around it was the San Paolo monastery. It is now the university's law library, a European documentation centre and a cafe, restored between 2010 and 2015, and through all of that the oak kept the middle of the yard. Walk in from Via Selmi through the corridor. It is free, and nobody asks what you want.