The White Fig of Villino Favaloro

Palermo's famous giant figs are Moreton Bay figs from Australia. This one is another species, a white fig, Ficus virens, whose wild range runs from India through South-East Asia to northern Australia, and Sicily's register of monumental trees gives it a trunk 10 metres round and a height of 20 metres. It grows in the garden of Villino Favaloro on Piazza Virgilio, just inside the railings, and leans so far over the pavement that you walk under the crown before you notice the trunk. The villa was built between 1889 and 1891 to a design by Giovan Battista Filippo Basile, and his son Ernesto finished it in 1913 and 1914. Nobody has published when the fig was planted. In February 2023 a Palermo agronomist warned that one limb, tilted more than 45 degrees over the pavement and the road, could snap under its own weight; the same limb had grown around the wire of the garden fence and swallowed it. In October 2026 a photographer found the tree standing, its crown still spread over the parked cars. A reader on r/sicily sent us here. "This big ass tree isn't the oldest but it's a rare species of ficus, like if I'm not wrong there are only 2 in EU." We have not counted them. If you know its age, tell us on this page. The villa is closed, so this is a tree you see from the street, free, at any hour.