What is the oldest tree in Palermo?

The Ficus macrophylla of the Orto Botanico, planted in 1845 and now about 181 years old. It grows inside the city's botanical garden, which charges standard entry.

Why is the Falcone Tree covered in messages?

After the mafia killed anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone in a 1992 car bombing, strangers began taping messages, photographs and poems to the fig tree outside his home on Via Notarbartolo. Palermitans call it l'Albero della Speranza, the Tree of Hope, and the tradition is renewed every 23 May.

Are Palermo's remarkable trees free to see?

Most are, standing in free public squares and parks. The two exceptions are the Orto Botanico's ficus and the interior of Villa Malfitano, both of which charge standard entry; Villa Malfitano's garden itself, where its dragon tree grows, is free.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Palermo

Palermo grows one species obsessively. Ficus macrophylla, the Moreton Bay fig, arrived from Australia in the 19th century and found a climate it liked even better than home, filling the city's villas and squares with trees whose aerial roots thicken into trunks of their own. The most famous, in Piazza Marina, is currently fighting a fungal infection that has cost it half its canopy. Its own parent tree still thrives quietly in the Botanical Garden nearby. Between the two: a fig turned into a murdered judge's memorial, two rare dragon trees, and a palm avenue inside Italy's first public garden.

Photo: Margherito1, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Ficus of Piazza Marina

Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 162 years · Kalsa

Half of Palermo's most famous tree is dying. A fungal infection has spread through roughly half the plant since 2016, drying out aerial roots and dropping branches in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and the city is still working out whether it can be saved. None of that undoes what is already there: a Ficus macrophylla planted around 1863 or 1864 in a garden laid out on the site of Inquisition executions, 188 people burned or garrotted in the same square over two centuries. The mayor who had it planted, the Marchese di Rudini, was marking the end of Bourbon rule after Garibaldi's arrival, and the tree later earned a second civic title, Tree of the 150 Years of Italian Unity, in 2011. Its trunk system has spread into a thicket of secondary trunks and aerial roots so dense that sources disagree on the real measurement, some citing a 20 metre circumference and others 36, depending on whether they are measuring the original trunk or the whole colonnaded mass it has since become. That confusion is itself the point: a fig this size stops being one trunk and starts being a small forest sharing one root system. Palermo's arborists are now doing what any city does for an ageing landmark, propping, monitoring and hoping the fungus loses before the tree does.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Klone123, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

The Falcone Tree

Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 90 years · Libertà

This fig has been Palermo's memorial wall for over three decades. On 23 May 1992 a mafia car bomb killed judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, and three bodyguards on the motorway into the city. Within days strangers began taping messages, photographs and poems to the trunk of the Ficus macrophylla outside his apartment building, and they have never really stopped. Palermitans call it l'Albero della Speranza, the Tree of Hope. The building itself is an unremarkable 1960s apartment block on a residential street, which is part of what makes the tree's transformation so complete: nobody would look twice at Via Notarbartolo without it. The city has since listed it as a protected cultural asset, and in 2023 a local council motion proposed a flowerbed specifically to stabilise its roots after arborists flagged structural risk, work that has continued with pruning and monitoring since. Every 23 May the covering paper and messages are renewed for the anniversary. The tree itself is roughly 90 years old, planted decades before anyone could have guessed what it would come to hold, which makes it older than the massacre it now stands for by about half a century.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Giuseppe ME, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Ficus of the Orto Botanico

Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 181 years · Kalsa

The most famous fig tree in Palermo is not the one in Piazza Marina, it is that tree's parent. Planted in the Orto Botanico in 1845, this Ficus macrophylla has spent 180 years building a canopy now measured at roughly 3,000 square metres, reportedly the largest crown of any tree in Europe, spread across 44 secondary trunks that grow down from the branches as aerial roots and thicken into full columns once they reach the ground. In 2023 it placed fourth in the European Tree of the Year contest after winning Italy's own national vote first, on the strength of more than 10,000 European votes. The garden's own records tie it directly to its more famous relative across town: the Piazza Marina fig was grown from a cutting taken off this one. Visiting means paying the botanical garden's standard entry fee, unlike its free offspring in the public square, but it buys a walk underneath a structure that no longer reads as a single tree so much as a roofed courtyard built from one root system. The species, native to Australia's Lord Howe Island and the Queensland coast, has now been growing on this one plot for longer than Italy has existed as a unified country.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: FrankAdamo, via Wikimedia Commons (Wiki Loves Monuments) (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Dragon Tree of Villa Malfitano

Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco) · approximately 140 years · Libertà

This tree bleeds, or its close relatives do: cut into a dragon tree's bark and the sap that runs out is dark red, sold for centuries across Europe as sangue di drago, dragon's blood, a dye and wound treatment. Palermo's own specimen, a Dracaena draco with a trunk just under six metres around, grows in the private botanical garden the Whitaker family built around their villa in the 1880s. The Whitakers had made their fortune in Marsala wine, the fortified wine Joseph Whitaker's grandfather helped turn into a British staple, and Joseph spent part of it hiring the botanist Emilio Kunzmann to fill the grounds with plants gathered from Tunisia, Sumatra and Australia rather than the classical statuary a Sicilian villa garden usually got. The dragon tree, native to the Canary Islands and Macaronesia rather than anywhere the family's ships actually sailed, was one specimen among that collection, assembled for curiosity rather than status. Its crown has since branched into the tiered, umbrella-like shape the species only reaches after decades of growth, each segment ending in a burst of stiff blue green leaves. No record survives of the exact planting date, only that it arrived with the rest of Kunzmann's garden. The park is free to walk; only the villa's interior charges for a guided tour.

Read more and get directions →

The Dragon Tree of the Palazzina Cinese

Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco) · approximately 136 years · Favorita

A Bourbon king built a Chinese pavilion in Sicily, and the dragon tree standing in front of it has outlasted every reason he had for doing so. Ferdinand III commissioned the Palazzina Cinese in 1799 from architect Venanzio Marvuglia as a retreat inside what became Parco della Favorita, part of a broader taste for chinoiserie that swept European royal courts with no particular logic attached to Sicily specifically. This Dracaena draco, about 136 years old, is the largest of several dragon trees planted around the building, its trunk now measuring six metres around and its condition tracked as good in Italy's own national tree register. The palazzina itself has been restored and reopened to the public after long closures, and the tree stands in the section of the Favorita that has always stayed open regardless, a royal hunting park turned public one generations ago. Joggers and tourists pass it daily without necessarily clocking that it predates the pavilion's current public opening by over a century, and that dragon trees like this one only flower, then branch, after decades of growth, which means this specimen's entire visible shape is a record of exactly how long it has already stood here.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: FrankAdamo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Ficus of Villa Trabia

Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · undated, likely planted in the late 19th century · Libertà

A single 1910 inventory of Villa Trabia's grounds recorded 2,790 plant species on one aristocratic estate, and one of the Ficus macrophylla planted for that collection is still standing, its trunk now nearly five metres around. The villa belonged to the Lucchesi Palli family, princes of Campofranco, who built it in the 18th century and spent the following hundred years turning the grounds into one of Palermo's most serious private botanical collections before the city eventually took the park over as public land. Roughly twenty other fig trees share the grounds today, descendants and companions from the same planting era, but this one's circumference sets it apart from the rest. The villa building itself now houses a municipal office and a public library, an unglamorous second act for grounds a prince once filled with rarities gathered from across the world for no reason beyond having them. The park was renamed in 2024 for Ninni Cassara, a police officer killed by the mafia in 1985, giving Villa Trabia the same layered history as Palermo's Falcone tree across town: a garden built for private pleasure now doubling as memorial ground. Open daily, free, no ticket required to stand beneath it.

Read more and get directions →

The Date Palm of Villa Bonanno

Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera) · approximately 120 years · Albergheria

Underneath this palm garden's soil sits a Roman house with a mosaic of Alexander the Great hunting a lion, uncovered by accident in the 19th century and left exactly where it was found. Villa Bonanno, laid out in 1905 in front of the Norman Palace that still seats Sicily's regional parliament, was built specifically to show off both: the archaeology below and roughly 400 date palms imported directly from Tunisia to fill the ground above it, reportedly the largest concentrated planting of Phoenix dactylifera anywhere in Europe. This specimen, measured at up to 2.5 metres around, stands among the mature survivors of that original planting, in a square that has spent 900 years as the political centre of Sicily under Normans, Spanish viceroys and now the regional government. The garden's designer, Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda, also built a small caretaker's house on site in the same period, one of the few original 1905 structures that survived a 2013 EU funded renovation covering three of Palermo's historic squares. The garden stays open around the clock, unfenced, a rare case of a European capital's most politically important square doubling as an all hours public park rather than a monument viewed from behind railings.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Dedda71, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The Palm Avenue of Villa Giulia

Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia robusta) · undated, planted in a 19th century garden expansion · Kalsa

Villa Giulia opened in 1778, which makes it, by most accounts, Italy's first public garden, decades before Rome, Florence or Milan opened anything comparable to ordinary citizens rather than nobility. Goethe visited in 1787 and called it the most stupendous place in the world, high praise from a man who had just finished touring the rest of the country. The garden's original 18th century layout, designed by Nicolo Palma with sculptures by Ignazio Marabitti, predates the entrance avenue most visitors actually remember: a colonnade of Washingtonia robusta, Mexican fan palms, planted along Via Lincoln when the garden expanded in the 19th century, tall enough now that walking the avenue means walking in dappled shade for its entire length regardless of the hour. The species is native to the Sonoran Desert, about as far from Sicily's climate zone as Mexico's coast, and it has thrived here since being introduced across southern Europe as an ornamental import. At the garden's centre, a marble sundial built to a 1784 design by the mathematician Lorenzo Federici still stands beside a fountain sculpted by Marabitti, both older than the palms that now frame the walk toward them. Free, open daily, still doing the job it was built for in 1778.

Read more and get directions →

Know an ancient tree in Palermo we missed? Suggest it.

Going there? Download all 8 trees as a map file and open it in Google Maps, Organic Maps or any hiking app. Works offline, no app needed.

Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Palermo?: The Ficus macrophylla of the Orto Botanico, planted in 1845 and now about 181 years old. It grows inside the city's botanical garden, which charges standard entry.
Why is the Falcone Tree covered in messages?: After the mafia killed anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone in a 1992 car bombing, strangers began taping messages, photographs and poems to the fig tree outside his home on Via Notarbartolo. Palermitans call it l'Albero della Speranza, the Tree of Hope, and the tradition is renewed every 23 May.
Is the giant fig tree in Piazza Marina dying?: It is seriously ill. A fungal infection has spread through roughly half the tree since 2016, drying out aerial roots and dropping branches in 2016, 2020 and 2024. The city is monitoring and propping it while studying whether it can be saved.
Are Palermo's remarkable trees free to see?: Most are, standing in free public squares and parks. The two exceptions are the Orto Botanico's ficus and the interior of Villa Malfitano, both of which charge standard entry; Villa Malfitano's garden itself, where its dragon tree grows, is free.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Palermo? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
Ancient trees in more cities: Amsterdam · Lisbon · London · Paris · Rome · Tokyo · Istanbul · Barcelona · Kyoto · Madrid · New York · Dublin · Edinburgh · Brussels · Antwerp · Vienna · Prague · Berlin · Seville · Porto · Athens · Florence · Milan · Venice · Munich · Nice · Lyon · Valencia · Malaga · Granada · Naples · Bologna · Verona · Cadiz

Know a tree that belongs on this list? Send it in. Suggestions feed curation; the list itself stays editorial.

Walk 5 of these trees about 5.5 km, 1h 13m on foot