Florence's old trees split between two origins. The Giardino dei Semplici, a botanical garden founded in 1545 to grow medicine for the Medici, holds the city's oldest documented trees: a yew planted in 1720, a cork oak from 1805, still growing where their directors put them. Almost everything else dates from one decade, the 1860s and 70s, when Florence briefly served as capital of unified Italy and architect Giuseppe Poggi carved new parks and viewpoints across the hills above the Arno. Both eras still stand, mostly overlooked by the millions who come only for the Duomo.
0 / 27 bezocht in Florence
Foto: Ilaria Camprincoli (CC BY-SA 2.5)
1
The Micheli Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · 306 years · San Marco
Florence's oldest verified tree grows behind a ticket gate, in a garden older than the city's most famous museums by two centuries. Pier Antonio Micheli planted this yew in 1720, while running the Orto Botanico for Cosimo III de' Medici, and it has now outlived the Grand Duchy that employed him by more than 150 years. At around 306 years old it is Florence's most precisely dated living thing: unlike the ring-count guesswork behind most ancient trees, its planting is on record because Micheli, one of Europe's first professional botanists, kept the garden's books himself. The trunk has thickened to nearly four metres around, and its dark, dense crown still throws the kind of deep shade yews are prized and feared for; every part of the tree except the red flesh around the seed is poisonous, a fact eighteenth century physicians studying it would have known well. The Giardino dei Semplici itself opened in 1545 to grow medicinal plants for the Medici, making it one of the oldest university botanical gardens anywhere in the world, and this yew has stood in it for nearly two thirds of that entire history. It survived the catastrophic 1966 Arno flood that drowned much of central Florence a few streets away, and it is still growing, still dropping the small red arils that birds strip clean every autumn.
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Foto: Peter Andersen, iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0)
2
The Cork Oak of the Giardino dei Semplici
Cork Oak (Quercus suber) · 221 years · San Marco
Every commercial cork oak in Portugal and Spain gets stripped bare every nine years or so, its bark peeled for wine corks and flooring while the tree survives underneath, scarred orange until it heals. Florence's cork oak, planted in 1805 by Ottaviano Targioni Tozzetti in the same botanical garden that grew Micheli's yew, has never once been stripped. Two centuries of undisturbed growth have thickened its bark into a spongy, deeply fissured armour more than four metres around, exactly the texture and thickness that would make a cork harvester elsewhere in the Mediterranean take notice. Left alone for research and teaching rather than product, it has instead grown one of the widest, most theatrical crowns in the Giardino dei Semplici, spreading over 400 square metres of canopy from a single trunk. Targioni Tozzetti directed the garden in the early 1800s, the third generation of a Tuscan dynasty of naturalists, and this tree was one of his additions to a collection built around teaching pharmacy students to recognise plants by sight rather than from a drawing. It stands a short walk from the yew, in a garden that has quietly kept some of the oldest documented specimens of both species in Italy, without either one ever having to earn its keep.
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Foto: Line1 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
3
The Montezuma Cypress
Montezuma Cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) · approximately 140 years · San Marco
Nothing else in Florence comes from Mexico, has a trunk seven metres around, and survived being struck by lightning barely a decade ago. This Montezuma cypress, a cousin of the American bald cypress native to riverbanks around Mexico City, went into the ground at the Giardino dei Semplici in the 1880s, brought north as one of the many botanical trophies nineteenth century gardens competed to acquire. It grew for over a century without much incident, reaching a girth few trees on this list can match, before a September 2014 storm hit it directly, splitting and reshaping its crown in a single afternoon. The tree survived, though its silhouette now carries the asymmetry of that strike rather than the tidy pyramid shape the species usually holds. In its native range this cypress can live for a thousand years or more, most famously as the Arbol del Tule near Oaxaca, one of the stoutest trees on Earth; Florence's specimen is a comparative youngster, but it is already the widest girthed tree in this entire list. Visitors touring the botanical garden for its more famous residents, the Medici era yew and the cork oak nearby, often walk straight past it without registering that they have just passed something that does not grow naturally anywhere within four thousand kilometres of Tuscany.
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4
The Farnia of the Ippodromo
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · over 100 years · Parco delle Cascine
The tallest tree in Florence's largest park stands where racehorses used to run. This pedunculate oak, rising 29 metres above the western meadows of the Parco delle Cascine, grows on the site of the old Ippodromo delle Mulina, a trotting racecourse that operated from 1891 until Florence's city council reclaimed the disused land in recent years. The oak predates the racecourse by generations. It is one of only six trees the City of Florence has formally recognised as monumental in its own right, a status granted well before the municipality's recent push to catalogue dozens more candidates across the Cascine and its historic villas, a list that has grown from a dozen entries in 2020 to 29 by 2026. Its trunk measures close to four and a half metres around, wide enough that arborists estimate its age at well over a century without ever finding a planting record to confirm it. What is certain is its size: nothing else standing in the Cascine's 130 hectares, a park with its own dark history (Nazi occupying forces used it for a mass execution in July 1944, still marked today by a memorial stone), comes close to this oak's height. It grows at the park's western edge, past the horse chestnuts and the poplars, far from the joggers and market stalls nearer the city, exactly where a tree left alone for a century tends to end up.
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5
The Leccio of the Cascine
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · estimated over 100 years · Parco delle Cascine
This holm oak has spent its whole life fighting for balance, and it shows. Growing beside the Arno-facing path through the Parco delle Cascine, not far from the market that sets up every Tuesday along the river, the tree has developed unusually large buttress roots and long exposed root sections that flare out from its base like something built rather than grown. Arborists who surveyed it in 2022 and again in 2025 recorded a trunk holding steady at just over four metres around and a canopy reaching nearly 19 metres high, and rated its health excellent both times, buttresses and all. Holm oaks are evergreen, native across the Mediterranean, and built to survive exactly the kind of periodic flooding the Arno has delivered to this park for centuries; the exposed, muscular root system is very likely the tree's own answer to wet, shifting soil rather than a defect. No documented planting date survives for it, which is typical for a park this old and this large, but its girth puts it easily past its first century. It stands in a stretch of the Cascine most tourists never reach, well past the old horse track, in the quieter western half of a park that has been public land since Napoleon's own sister, Elisa Baciocchi, opened the former Medici hunting grounds to ordinary Florentines during her rule as Grand Duchess of Tuscany.
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6
The Honey Locust of Salviatino
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · age undocumented · Salviatino
Florence has two trees popularly linked to Judas, and this is the one people picture wrong. The tree usually called Albero di Giuda in Italian is Cercis siliquastrum, the small pink flowered species tied to the legend that Judas hanged himself from one; this is Spino di Giuda, a completely different tree, honey locust, native to North America and named instead for its genuinely vicious thorns, some once over ten centimetres long, that grew along its trunk and branches before cultivated varieties bred them softer. Florence's specimen, standing alone at a residential intersection in Salviatino on the city's northeastern edge, has never been bred for anything. Its trunk has thickened to five and a half metres around, among the largest recorded for the species anywhere, and Italy's own monumental tree registry gives it national level significance, a rating few other Florentine trees share. No planting record survives, which is common for a tree standing on what was once open agricultural land before Salviatino urbanised around it. It offers little shade in winter and no flowers to speak of, and most residents of the surrounding apartment blocks likely have no idea their street corner holds a genuine botanical record holder.
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7
The Cedar of the Bobolino
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · age undocumented, garden dates from the 1860s-70s · Bobolino, near Porta Romana
Most of Florence's grand hillside gardens exist because the city briefly ran the whole of Italy. When Florence served as the young kingdom's capital between 1865 and 1871, architect Giuseppe Poggi was given the job of modernising it, and alongside demolishing the old city walls for wide boulevards he laid out a string of new parks on the hills above the Arno, of which the Bobolino, a modest wedge of public garden near Porta Romana, is one of the smallest and least visited. Its centrepiece is this cedar of Lebanon, now with a trunk over four and a half metres around and a crown just past 22 metres tall, standing roughly where Poggi's plan put it a century and a half ago. Italy's regional registry lists this cedar among Tuscany's officially recognised monumental trees, one entry in the growing tally of Florence specimens that has expanded from a dozen in 2020 to 29 candidates by 2026 as the municipality works through a backlog of overlooked trees across its parks. Unlike its more famous neighbour Boboli a few hundred metres away, the Bobolino charges nothing and never closes its gates, which makes this cedar one of the few genuinely monumental trees in Florence that anyone can walk up to at any hour of the day or night.
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8
The Cedar Above Pegasus
Himalayan Cedar (Cedrus deodara) · age undocumented, likely under 160 years · Boboli Gardens, Oltrarno
Florence's public symbol has stood next to this cedar since 1865, and almost nobody visiting climbs high enough in the Boboli Gardens to notice either one. The Giardino del Cavaliere, a walled terrace at the garden's highest point, holds a winged horse statue that the Tuscany region has since adopted as its own official emblem, sculpted by Aristodemo Costoli the same year Florence became capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. Growing beside it is a deodar cedar, a Himalayan species that had only reached European gardens a few decades earlier, after British and French plant hunters brought seed back from the mountains of Kashmir and Nepal in the 1830s and 40s. Boboli's specimen has grown a trunk nearly four and three quarter metres around, evergreen and untouched by the seasonal crowds that mob the garden's lower amphitheatre for weddings and photographs. No planting record for this particular tree has surfaced, so its age can only be bounded by the species' own arrival in Europe and the terrace's known history, putting it somewhere in its second century at most. It stands quietly above one of the most visited gardens in Italy, on a terrace most day trippers skip because it means one more flight of steps after the main lawns.
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Foto: PROPOLI87 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
9
The Ginkgo of Piazzale Michelangelo
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · age undocumented, likely under 150 years · Piazzale Michelangelo, Oltrarno
Millions of people photograph the view from Piazzale Michelangelo every year, and almost none of them photograph the tree they are standing under to do it. This ginkgo grows at the edge of the piazzale that architect Giuseppe Poggi built in 1875 as the grand viewing terrace for his newly reshaped city, planted among the dozens of ornamental species Poggi and his gardener Attilio Pucci chose to line the new hillside boulevards. Ginkgo biloba is often called a living fossil, the sole surviving member of a family of trees that flourished alongside dinosaurs and has barely changed since; this specimen, with a trunk three metres around, is a comparative newcomer at well under 150 years old, but it belongs to the oldest tree lineage on this entire list by a margin of tens of millions of years. Every November its fan shaped leaves turn a uniform gold and drop within days, all at once, rather than fading gradually the way most autumn colour does, briefly carpeting the ground in a colour that photographs even better than the skyline behind it. No exact planting date has been documented for this individual tree, only its presence in the same landscaping scheme as the piazzale itself.
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10
The Pine of Villa Vogel
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · age undocumented · Isolotto-Legnaia, Quartiere 4
Florence's Renaissance gardens get all the attention; this pine grows in a very different kind of park. The Parco di Villa Vogel sits in Isolotto-Legnaia, a residential district southwest of the historic centre with none of the tour groups that fill Boboli or the queues outside the Uffizi, in a villa the Vogel family donated to the city in the 1980s so their grounds could become a public playground, skating rink and picnic area for the neighbourhood. This stone pine stands in what surveyors describe as the oldest surviving section of that original garden, in an isolated spot still ringed by centuries-old cypresses that predate the villa's donation by generations. Its trunk measures a modest three and a third metres around, smaller than the show-garden specimens across town, but it has outlived whatever family occasion or landscaping fashion first put it there, and it now shades children's play equipment instead of a private lawn. No record of its planting survives, consistent with a garden built for a family rather than catalogued for visitors. It is a reminder that Florence's old trees are not only in ticketed gardens and postcard piazzas: some of them just ended up in the park nearest to where ordinary Florentines happen to live.
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Foto: Line1 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
11
The Caucasian Elm That Was Cut Back to Save It
Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia) · about 199 years, planted 1827 · San Marco
In the 1980s this tree lost roughly two thirds of its height in a single operation, and it is still on the national register. The garden planted a Caucasian elm here in 1827 and it grew the way the species does, slowly, into a trunk now close to six metres around. Then a fungal outbreak arrived, named in one register as Dutch elm disease, and the answer was surgery rather than a saw at the base. The branches came off hard, and what stands today is a fluted grey column carrying a crown regrown out of the cuts. The national register still lists this tree at thirty metres tall. The 2021 field survey measured ten. Both numbers are honest, they simply belong to different decades, and the difference between them is the operation. Zelkova carpinifolia is not an elm, whatever everyone calls it. It is a close cousin from a small range in the Caucasus and along the southern shore of the Caspian, and it is planted across Europe precisely because it shrugs off the disease that emptied the continent of its elms, which is worth thinking about while standing in front of one that needed cutting back anyway. The trunk is the thing to look at: buttressed, silver, and wildly out of proportion to everything above it.
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Foto: Line1 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
12
The Zelkova Somebody Keeps Measuring
Saw-leaf Zelkova (Zelkova serrata) · 135 years, planted 1891 · San Marco
Somebody has put a tape around this trunk three times in forty years: 3.30 metres in 1980, 3.89 in 2001, 4.40 in 2021. Very few trees anywhere carry that kind of paper trail, and it means you can watch this one grow at roughly two and a half centimetres of girth a year without waiting around for it. The garden planted it in 1891 and credits it with the widest crown in the whole collection, which in a place this old is a real claim. Zelkova serrata comes from Japan, Korea and eastern China, where it is the keyaki, the timber used for temple pillars and the bodies of taiko drums, and it is the species most often trained as a broom-form bonsai because the branching is naturally so even. At full size the same habit produces a vase: a short trunk dividing into a fan of near-equal limbs. The bark is the detail to look for. It flakes off in small rounded plates and leaves orange patches underneath, so the trunk reads as a mosaic rather than a texture, and it is the fastest way to pick this tree out from the path. In autumn the leaves turn orange and rust before they drop.
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Foto: Line1 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
13
The Flag-Crowned Pine
Turkish Pine (Pinus brutia) · over 130 years, in the garden since the late 1800s · San Marco
The garden keeps this pine under constant watch, and says so in print, because its crown has grown into a flag. Almost all the weight sits on one side of a long bare trunk thirty-three metres up, which is what happens when a tree spends a century reaching for the only gap in a crowded collection, and it is also the shape most likely to fail in a storm. Publishing that about a tree you are proud of is unusually frank. The pine has been in the collection since the late 1800s and took up its present position in 1922. It is the Turkish pine, though Italian sources call it pino bruzio after Calabria, and botanists have argued for a century over whether it is a species in its own right or a subspecies of the Aleppo pine; the national register still files it under Pinus halepensis. It comes from the eastern Mediterranean, from Turkey and Cyprus and the Levant, where it is the pine that colonises burnt ground first and where resin was tapped from it for centuries. Its needles are longer and darker than the Aleppo pine's, and its cones sit almost stalkless against the branch, pointing forwards. Stand back towards the garden wall to take in the whole of it.
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Foto: Sistema Museale di Ateneo, Universita degli Studi di Firenze
14
The Himalayan Cedar of the Semplici
Himalayan Cedar (Cedrus deodara) · at least 146 years, on the garden's books from 1880 · San Marco
The Himalayan cedar only reached Europe in 1822, and this one was on the garden's books by 1880, which makes it an early adopter of a tree that half the continent would go on to plant in every park it built. It has had at least 146 years to make the case: four and a fifth metres round, twenty-eight metres up, with the drooping branch tips that separate a deodar from the stiffer cedars of Lebanon and the Atlas. The leading shoot nods over instead of standing straight and the outer branches hang in soft grey-green curtains, which is the quickest way to tell the three cedars apart from thirty metres off, and worth knowing here because a cedar of Lebanon grows across the river at the Bobolino. In its own range, from Afghanistan through Kashmir to western Nepal, this species reaches sixty metres on mountainsides at two thousand metres, and its wood resists rot well enough that Himalayan temples were built from it. Deodar comes from devadaru, the Sanskrit for timber of the gods. The garden acquired it during the decades when European collections competed for Himalayan and Mexican material, the same appetite that brought the Montezuma cypress here four years later. It is evergreen, so it looks much the same whenever you come, which is a reason to go rather than a reason to wait.
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15
The Tree of the Newlyweds
Incense Cedar (Calocedrus decurrens) · age undocumented, garden laid out 1865-1877 · Bobolino
Two enormous branches rise parallel to the trunk like a pair of horns, and Florence has been making the obvious joke for generations: locals know this tree as l'albero dei cornuti, the tree of the cuckolds. Newlyweds pose in front of it anyway, in such numbers that it picked up a politer second name, l'albero degli sposi, and both names are still in use. It is an incense cedar, native to the mountains of Oregon and California, and its trunk is five and a half metres around at chest height, which for the species in Europe is close to extraordinary. It stands to the left of the central flowerbed in the Giardino del Bobolino, the middle section of the English-style garden Giuseppe Poggi built along the Viale dei Colli between 1865 and 1877, when Florence was briefly the capital of Italy and Poggi was rebuilding its hillsides. Crush a fallen leaf spray and it smells sharply resinous, which is where the name comes from. A severe storm in the winter of 1985 damaged the trunk badly and it recovered. The city gave it formal protection in 2020. The cedar of Lebanon on this page stands a few steps away, so the two are one stop, not two.
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16
The Stone Pine of the Bobolino
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · Bobolino, near Porta Romana
Stone pines are known for their width, not their height. This one is 31.5 metres tall.
The umbrella pine gives the Italian skyline its flat-topped silhouette, and it usually does that from a bare trunk of ten or fifteen metres. The Bobolino pine has gone up as well as out, with a trunk of 412 centimetres around, standing on the Oltrarno hillside among the villas and small parks that cover the slope south of the river. Two other protected trees stand within fifty metres of it, so getting to all three costs nothing more than turning around.
One caution about those numbers, though a smaller one than it used to be. RAMI, Italy's separate registry of monumental trees, later surveyed this pine independently and came back with a height of 31.60 metres against the national register's 31.5, close enough to read as confirmation rather than disagreement. No age has ever been published for it.
A stone pine carries cones that take three years to ripen, which means the ground beneath it holds cones at every stage at once, green and closed, grey and opening, and spent. The nuts inside are pinoli, the ones that go into pesto, and prising them out of the shell is why they cost what they cost.
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17
The Monterey Cypress of the Giardino Simone Weil
Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa)
In the wild this species grows on two small headlands in California and nowhere else on earth. There is one of it on a Florentine hillside.
Cupressus macrocarpa survives naturally at Cypress Point and Point Lobos near Monterey, a couple of miles of wind-flattened trees on the Pacific coast. Move it away from that coast and it behaves like a different plant: it grows fast, spreads wide and reaches sizes it never manages at home, which is how it ended up in gardens from New Zealand to Tuscany. This one has a trunk of 388 centimetres and stands 18.5 metres, dark and broad-crowned, in a free public garden a hundred metres or so from the Bobolino trees.
What is not known about it is the interesting part. The national register of monumental trees carries the species, the girth and the height, and nothing else. No age, no planting date, no record of who put it there, and no independent source was found to corroborate any of it. A Monterey cypress of this size in Italy is most likely a nineteenth-century garden planting, from the decades when the species had just reached Europe and every serious garden wanted one. That is inference rather than evidence, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are being handed.
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18
The Cypress of the Monte alle Croci Steps
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · Monte alle Croci, between Piazza Giuseppe Poggi and San Miniato al Monte
This cypress grows beside a staircase, on the pilgrim climb from the river up to San Miniato al Monte.
The Via del Monte alle Croci is the stepped route that leaves Piazza Poggi and works up the hill to the basilica, which has held the highest ground in Florence since the eleventh century. Mediterranean cypress lines approaches like that all over Tuscany, planted for its narrow dark column and for a habit of outliving whoever planted it. This one is 21.5 metres tall with a trunk of 346 centimetres, which is heavy for a species that usually stays slim, and it stands about 250 metres from Piazzale Michelangelo, so the walk between the two takes no detour at all.
Nobody has published an age for it. RAMI, a separate Italian registry, surveyed the tree independently and confirmed the same size. The comune's own history of the stairway records that a monastery superior had a double row of cypresses planted here in the 18th century to shelter pilgrims climbing to San Miniato, and calls this the oldest Via Crucis in Italy, real context for the row, though no source ties this exact trunk to that planting rather than a later replacement in the same line.
Cupressus sempervirens means always green, and it is. The tree looks in January exactly as it looks in July, which is part of why this hillside reads the same in every season and why the climb is as good in winter.
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19
The Aleppo Pine of Via Giramondino
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · Viale Galileo, on the Viale dei Colli between Bobolino and Piazzale Michelangelo
An Aleppo pine keeps its cones sealed on the branch for years and opens them with heat, so the fire that kills the tree sows the next generation.
That is a strategy built for a hot, dry, fire-prone coast, and it is why Pinus halepensis covers so much of the western Mediterranean while barely appearing in the Syrian city it was named after. In Florence it is a planted tree rather than a wild one. This one stands on Viale Galileo, part of the ring of hillside boulevards Giuseppe Poggi cut in the 1860s, when Florence was briefly the capital of Italy and rebuilt itself for the job. Its trunk measures 323 centimetres and it reaches 22.5 metres, the slightest of the protected trees on this stretch, though it is also the one you walk past whether you meant to or not: it sits roughly midway between the Bobolino and Piazzale Michelangelo.
The evidence behind it was thin and is a little less so now. RAMI, a separate Italian registry, later surveyed the tree independently and came back with a close-to-matching height, and the comune names it by street in its own account of the city's monumental trees. Still no age from anyone.
To tell it from the stone pines on the same walk, look at the bark high up, where an Aleppo pine goes pale grey with orange showing in the fissures, and at the needles, which are finer and a lighter green.
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20
The Strawberry Tree of the Giardino dell'Iris
Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo)
The strawberry tree flowers and ripens fruit at the same time, so in autumn it hangs white bells and red fruit on the same branch.
Arbutus unedo is usually a shrub you can see over the top of. This one is eight metres tall and grows in the iris garden beside Piazzale Michelangelo. Its entry on the national register of monumental trees records that height and leaves the girth column empty, and no age has been published anywhere, so what is known about it is a species, a spot and eight metres. Pliny gave it the second half of its name, unedo, from unum edo, I eat only one, which remains a fair review. The fruit looks like a lychee crossed with a raspberry and tastes of very little.
Timing matters more here than for most trees on this list, and not in the tree's favour. The garden opens for only a few weeks each spring, around the iris flowering it was made for, so the autumn moment when the arbutus does its trick usually falls when the gate is shut. Go for the irises, find the strawberry tree while you are inside, and take the fruit on trust.
Its record rests on one register entry that the comune republishes, which is one source rather than two.
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21
The Chilean Wine Palm of Villa di Rusciano
Chilean Wine Palm (Jubaea chilensis) · Gavinana
This palm was very nearly harvested out of existence for its sap, which was boiled down into a honey. Getting the sap meant felling the tree.
Jubaea chilensis carries one of the thickest trunks in the palm family, a grey column more than a metre across, and it grows slowly enough that a tapped tree meant a century of growth spent on a single harvest of palm honey. Chile's wild population collapsed under that trade and now survives in a few protected valleys. The species is also among the hardiest palms there is, which is how it reached Italian villa gardens in the nineteenth century: a palm that could take a frost was worth a great deal to anyone laying out an exotic garden in a climate that kills most of them.
This one measures 349 centimetres around and stands 15.5 metres, in the park of a municipal villa east of the centre. Its record is a single line, the national listing of monumental trees with the city republishing the same entry, and it carries no age and no planting date.
It sits well east of the hillside trees and makes its own errand rather than joining a walk. Whether that is worth an afternoon depends on how many palms with a trunk like a stone column you have stood next to.
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22
The Cypress of Villa della Petraia
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens)
Only one trunk on Florence's register of monumental trees is thicker than this cypress, and it belongs to a Montezuma cypress.
At 580 centimetres around, this is not the slim dark exclamation mark that Mediterranean cypress usually makes in a Tuscan view. It is a heavy old tree, and it stands in the garden of Villa della Petraia, a Medici villa about five kilometres north of the centre, open to visitors and listed by UNESCO with the other Medici villas and gardens. The Medici bought the estate in the sixteenth century and rebuilt it, and the terraced garden the cypress grows in came out of that work.
The evidence is one entry deep. The national register carries the species and the girth, the comune reprints it, and neither publishes an age, so a tree of obvious antiquity has no date attached to it at all. It has the trunk of something that has been standing a very long time, and nobody has written down how long.
Cypress wood barely rots, which is why it was used for chests, doors and coffins, and why old cypresses tend to stay structurally sound long after other species have hollowed out. That is the quiet advantage behind most of the very old cypresses in Italy, this one included.
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23
The Cypress of the Boboli Gardens
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · roughly 375 years · Boboli Gardens (Oltrarno)
Boboli's most famous cypresses are the double row lining the Viottolone, the avenue that runs straight down the hill from the amphitheatre. This one stands apart from that avenue, its own listed specimen in Italy's monumental tree register, closer to the Pitti Palace end of the garden than to the avenue's cypress ranks.
At 357 centimetres round and up to 30 metres tall, it is unremarkable in a garden that specialises in exactly this species and exactly this kind of size. What sets it apart is the paperwork: the Tuscan tree register calculates its age at roughly 375 years from what it calls a registered birth year, a documentary basis this page has not been able to independently verify, so take the figure as a considered estimate rather than a fact carved in stone. If it holds, the tree predates the Boboli that most visitors recognise, laid out under later Medici dukes through the seventeenth century, though nothing ties this specific trunk to any one phase of that construction.
The Boboli Gardens began in 1549 as the Medici's private garden and only opened to the public in 1766. Entry now runs on the same combined ticket as the Uffizi and Pitti Palace, so this cypress is one of the easier stops on the whole Florence page to actually reach: a short walk from the Ponte Vecchio, inside a garden that gets crowded with or without a 375-year-old tree to look for.
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The Pine of Via del Pino
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · Coverciano
This stone pine did not move onto a street named after it. The street took its name from the tree, and Via del Pino in the Florentine suburb of Coverciano has pointed at this one trunk for longer than anyone recorded. It stands squeezed onto the pavement between apartment buildings and small shops, its trunk swollen to more than four metres round and its crown rising almost thirty metres above the rooftops, the kind of scale that makes an ordinary residential street feel briefly like a piazza.
Nobody has dated it. Stone pines grow at wildly different rates depending on how they are pruned and crowded, and no comparable local tree offered a growth curve to estimate from, so the honest answer is that it has simply outlasted the memory of whoever planted it. Two published surveys of Tuscany's veteran trees, Patriarchi vegetali and Toscana cento alberi da salvare, both singled it out, and Italy's own forestry ministry lists it on the national monumental tree register under its street address alone, because the tree and the address are the same fact.
It has watched Coverciano grow up around it rather than the other way round. Shops opened beside it, buildings rose to its shoulders, buses started stopping two minutes from its base, and it kept standing on the sidewalk it was there for first.
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25
The Farnia of Mantignano
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · around a century old · Mantignano
Local memory says a soldier planted this oak the day he came home. Artemio Berti is supposed to have put it in the ground in Mantignano in 1917, back from fighting in the First World War, on what was then open land on Florence's western edge. Tuscany's own citizen tree register repeats the story, though as oral testimony rather than a written record, and it does not quite agree with itself: a growth-rate estimate on the same page puts the tree at around 126 years, which would date the planting closer to 1900, nearly two decades before Berti is said to have come home. Nobody has settled which is right, so this page gives the range rather than picking a number. What both surveys agree on is the tree itself: a single pedunculate oak grown standing alone, its trunk about 3.6 metres round and its crown reaching some 18 metres, healthy as of an inspection in October 2025. It is Florence's second farnia, a different tree from the older one at the Ippodromo delle Cascine 2.4 kilometres away, and it still stands where Berti is said to have left it, on an ordinary residential street that has grown up around it since.
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26
The Poplar of the Renaioli
Black Poplar (Populus nigra) · Isolotto
This poplar is named after a trade that has almost vanished from the Arno: the renaioli, the boatmen who dredged sand and gravel from the riverbed by hand for generations, a tradition kept alive today only by a cultural association that still bears their name. The tree stands near a stretch of riverbank called Lungarno dei Pioppi, Poplar Riverbank, whose own name almost certainly comes from trees like this one once lining the Arno here. Two surveys, Italy's national monumental tree register and Tuscany's own citizen register, independently confirm it under a single official file number, and the more recent of the two, from March this year, measured the trunk at 4.84 metres round on a tree standing some 18.5 metres tall. Its health is recorded as adequate rather than vigorous, and nobody has recorded its age: black poplars grow fast and unevenly, and no reliable estimate exists for this one, so the question stays open rather than guessed at. It stands on public ground in the Isolotto district, close enough to Florence's other western trees, the pine of Villa Vogel and the holm oak of the Cascine, to be part of the same afternoon's walk.
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27
The Hackberries of Piazza Vasari
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · roughly 150 to 300 years, judged from a trunk 4.07 m round · Campo di Marte
In November 2025 Italy's state railway announced it would fell twenty one trees in this small square to rebuild the nearby Ponte al Pino bridge: fifteen hackberries, two maples, two planes, two holm oaks. This cluster of three hackberries was not among them. Tuscany's own monumental tree register had already flagged two of the piazza's oldest hackberries as protected, and local reporting on the works stated plainly that the pine and the historic trees would not be touched. Almost everything else nearby came down. These stayed.
The three stand together in one garden bed in Piazza Giorgio Vasari, a residential square in Campo di Marte, easy to mistake for an ordinary planting until you look at the trunks. The largest measures just over four metres round and rises about eighteen and a half metres, with two slightly smaller companions beside it, at just under four metres and three and a half metres round. Italy's national monumental tree register lists all three separately, cross checked here against Tuscany's own citizen register, which recorded the largest still in good health as recently as October 2025, weeks before the felling notice went out.
Nobody has recorded their age: hackberries can stand for centuries unremarked, and this entry will not guess where it cannot measure. What is documented is rarer than age, a protection order that held, in a square minutes from a busy railway station with nothing between you and the trunks but open grass.
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