The Holm Oak of Sant'Andrea delle Dame

Four 16th century Neapolitan noblewomen, sisters who took religious vows together, founded the convent whose cloister now holds this holm oak, one of two trees the site is best known for alongside a camphor said to have been planted by Joachim Murat during his brief reign as King of Naples. At 24 metres, the oak is the taller of the pair and the more anonymously documented, no individual planting date or attributed founder the way the camphor has, simply a long-established presence in a cloister garden enclosed by piperno stone arcades and rows of Washingtonia palms locally reckoned the tallest in the city. The convent the sisters founded in 1580 has since become the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, and the cloister, once a place of enclosed religious life, now sits inside a working university building, its centuries-old wooded garden intact around students and staff rather than nuns. Quercus ilex is Mediterranean by origin, evergreen year round, and slow enough growing that a specimen this size represents a very long, very undocumented stretch of the site's history.