The Eucalyptus of the Villa Comunale

Six metres seventy-six round the trunk, which makes this the thickest tree on Naples' own register. It stands in the Villa Comunale, the long public garden on the seafront at Chiaia, against the fence on the right as you come in from the Riviera di Chiaia gate. Both registers agree on it exactly, the national list and Campania's own card: 6.76 metres of girth, 25 metres of height. A river red gum, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, which in Australia grows along seasonal watercourses and is the most widely planted eucalypt on earth, chosen everywhere in the nineteenth century for the speed at which it turns wet ground into timber. A claim follows this tree around the tourism sites, that it was the first eucalyptus planted in Europe, in 1805. It may well be, and none of those pages says where the date comes from, so it is not on this page as a fact. If you can point at a source, we would like it. Neither register carries an age at all. The garden itself was laid out in 1697 as a royal promenade and opened to the public in the nineteenth century, and it still runs a kilometre along the bay with the aquarium in the middle of it. The park closes at ten.