The Ficus of the Orto Botanico

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, because 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.