The Date Palm of Villa Bonanno

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.