The Plane Tree of the Villa Comunale

Naples's seafront garden holds five of the twenty-six trees the Campania region has catalogued as monumental across the whole city, and this Oriental plane, standing beside the Fontana dei Leoni near the garden's street boundary, is among the most substantial: 18 metres tall with a trunk 428cm across. The Villa Comunale itself dates to the years of French rule in the early 19th century, when Naples answered to Joseph Bonaparte and then Joachim Murat, and its planting scheme, planes alongside weeping willows, citrus and acacias, followed instructions traceable to that Bonapartist administration rather than to the Bourbon court that had governed the city before and would again after. The garden runs along the Chiaia waterfront between the sea and the city's grand 19th century apartment blocks, and this plane is one of three catalogued specimens of its species growing within it, alongside one monumental eucalyptus and a single giant palm that share the same official protected status.