The Ficus of Piazza Marina

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.