The Fig of Villa Malfitano

When Delia Whitaker was buried, her funeral carriage was asked to stop under this tree. She was the last of the family to live at Villa Malfitano, and she had spent her life pausing beneath this fig, a daily habit the household knew well enough to build into the day she left the house for the last time. The tree was planted in 1888 by her father, Joseph Whitaker, known in the family as Pip, in the years he was stocking the grounds with plants gathered from well outside Sicily. It is the specimen closest to the house, and it grows the way the species does when nothing crowds it, long horizontal branches running out parallel to the ground rather than climbing, until the tree reads as a low green ceiling instead of a column. Italy's national register of monumental trees measures its trunk system at twenty-one metres around. The Italian gardens association, which keeps its own record of this place, describes it as second in size only to the famous specimen in Palermo's botanical garden, a comparison worth reporting as theirs rather than repeating as ours, since the city's big figs are measured by different people using different methods. The garden is free to walk. Only the villa's interior charges, and only for a guided tour.