Seven of the ten trees on this page sit within a kilometre of Perugia's centre, which makes it one of the tighter walks on this site. Six are cedars and cedar relatives, planted through the nineteenth century as the city laid out its public gardens, and each has a reason to exist: one hosted a concert twelve metres up in its crown, one grows where a fortress was torn down out of spite, one is so thick for its height that it needs bracing. The last two are country trees, enormous oaks on a lane at Prepo.
0 of 10 visited in Perugia
1
The Palazzo Murena Cedar
Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica) · roughly 155 to 185 years (planted circa 1861) · Centro Storico
In 2020 a trumpeter and an accordionist played a concert twelve metres up in this tree. Paolo Fresu and Daniele di Bonaventura performed a set titled Two for Tree from the crown of the Atlas cedar in the cloister of Palazzo Murena, the rectorate of the University of Perugia, with the audience listening from the courtyard below. The tree could take it. It was planted just after Italian unification, around 1861, in the eclectic garden taste of that moment, and is somewhere between 150 and 185 years old depending on which source you ask. The national register gives 485 centimetres of girth and 25 metres of height; La Nazione measured it in 2021 at five metres round, 30 metres tall and 35 metres across the crown. Take either. It is the largest thing inside the cloister by a wide margin, and the walls it grew up between have kept it out of the wind for its whole life. Lightning found it anyway at some point, and left scars still visible on the trunk. Climbing arborists went up in October 2010 to prune it and consolidate the crown, and it was pronounced in excellent health in 2020, the year of the concert. The cloister is free and open during normal building hours, five minutes from Piazza IV Novembre, which makes this the easiest monumental tree in Perugia to reach and the least likely to be spotted from the street.
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2
The Atlas Cedar of Piazza Italia
Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica) · over a century · Centro Storico
This cedar is rooted in the site of a fortress Perugia demolished out of spite. The Rocca Paolina was a papal stronghold built over the houses of the families who opposed the pope, and when the city came out from under papal rule in 1860 it tore the fortress down and laid Piazza Italia over the ground, a square whose entire argument was that the Rocca no longer stood there. The flowerbeds went in with it, and the Atlas cedar in them is one of the survivors of that planting, alongside a red fir of similar age. Local sources call it a century old specimen without fixing a year, so over a century is the honest figure rather than a precise one; the register adds 390 centimetres of girth and 23 metres of height. What makes it worth the two minute walk up from Piazza IV Novembre is where it stands, at the top of Corso Vannucci on the edge of the terrace that looks out over the Umbrian valley. The fortress is still down there under your feet, its lower streets preserved and walkable, which is how most people now arrive at the square, riding escalators up through the ruins of the thing the cedar replaced.
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3
The Cedar of Lebanon at Porta Pesa
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · over a century · Porta Pesa
A cedar of Lebanon this thick should be twice as tall. This one measures 410 centimetres round the trunk and 12.5 metres to the top, squat to the point of oddity for the species, and it now carries elastic guy wires and fixed bracing holding its main limbs together. The city installed those over February and March 2025, along with pruning, deadwood removal and a rebalancing of the crown, work done under a care programme run with Umbria's regional forestry service for Perugia's monumental trees. Read cabling as good news. A tree gets braced when somebody has decided it is worth keeping. It grows on the open square at Largo di Porta Pesa, directly in front of the Ciabatti Montessori elementary school, so several generations of Perugian children have had it as the thing outside the window, and the comune calls it century old without naming a year. Cedar of Lebanon reached Italian gardens from the mountains of the Levant, where the surviving old groves are now fenced and counted individually. A low, wide, heavily limbed specimen like this one is what the species does when it grows in the open with nothing competing for light, which is also why it needs the hardware: those limbs are long, horizontal and heavy. Porta Pesa is five to ten minutes on foot from Piazza IV Novembre.
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4
The Cedar of Lebanon at Croce Rossa
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · Centro Storico
The national register knows how tall this cedar is and not how wide. Its sheet records 18 metres of height and leaves the girth field blank, a gap in the paperwork rather than a lost measurement, and nobody has filled it in since. So the honest description of Perugia's second cedar of Lebanon is this: 18 metres, standing on a public square, and you can judge the trunk yourself when you get there. It grows at Largo della Croce Rossa on Via Masi, a short walk downhill from Piazza Italia and Palazzo Murena, and La Nazione named it specifically in a survey of the city's monumental trees under municipal care, which is how we know it is being looked after rather than merely listed. No age is recorded anywhere. Cedar of Lebanon was planted all over nineteenth century Italy as a status tree, the conifer of the Bible and of Lebanon's flag, which is why a city this size ends up with two of them ten minutes apart and no particular reason for either. Between the pair, this is the taller by a clear margin, 18 metres against the 12.5 of the Porta Pesa cedar, which is roughly what the species does when it has been left to run up rather than out.
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5
The Hackberry of Via Fiume
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · Centro Storico
Italians call this species spaccasassi, the rock splitter, because its roots get into stone and open it. They plant it in city streets anyway, because little else gives that much shade on that little water. This one has been on Via Fiume long enough to reach 445 centimetres round the trunk and 21 metres tall, a serious size for a hackberry and a very serious size for a tree growing out of a street in a hill town rather than a garden with soil to spare. Perugia's centre is built along a ridge with its streets cut into the slope, so a tree of this age here has spent its whole life finding water under paving. La Nazione named it alongside the city's two cedars of Lebanon in a survey of the monumental trees the comune maintains, and the same programme covers it: inspection, pruning, and the working assumption that it stays. Its age is not on record and no source estimates one. Mediterranean hackberry leafs out late, drops small dark fruit in autumn that the birds clear before most people notice it, and keeps smooth grey bark like a beech into old age, which is the quickest way to tell it from anything else on the street. It is a few minutes' walk from Piazza Italia.
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6
The Holm Oaks of Giardini del Frontone
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · secular (multiple centuries), planting begun 18th century · Borgo XX Giugno
On 20 June 1859 papal Swiss Guards and the Antibes Legion came up the hill and sacked Perugia, and these oaks were already old. A local history piece in 2025 put the question directly, asking what the secular holm oaks of the Frontone saw that day, the last serious violence in the city before Italian unification. The gardens are older still. They were laid out from 1707 for the Accademia degli Arcadi, a literary society that wanted somewhere to hold its summer gatherings, on ground used for military drill since the 1400s and, long before that, as an Etruscan necropolis. The avenues of holm oak went in with the garden and were finished through the 1800s, along with the pool, the statues and the Arco del Frontone of 1791. Two of the oaks are individually listed in the national register, at 350 and 342 centimetres round and 15.5 and 21.5 metres tall, standing about 70 metres apart along the same avenues. The pin marks the gardens rather than one trunk, because the walk under the oaks is the thing here, not a single tree. Holm oak holds its leaves all year, so the avenues are dark and cool in August, which is exactly what the Arcadians wanted them for. The gardens are free, opposite the Abbey of San Pietro, fifteen to twenty minutes south of the centro storico on foot.
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7
The Himalayan Cedar of the Cimitero Monumentale
Himalayan Cedar (Cedrus deodara) · Monteluce/Cimitero
Perugia's monumental cemetery opens at seven every morning, costs nothing, and holds a Himalayan cedar with a trunk 496 centimetres round and 23.5 metres of tree above it. Italian monumental cemeteries are built to be walked in. Milan's and Genoa's draw visitors for their sculpture and their planting as much as for the graves, and this one, out on Via Enrico dal Pozzo in the Monteluce district, is the same kind of place: gravel avenues, cypresses, and this cedar over the top of them. The Templar church of San Bevignate, with its thirteenth century frescoes, stands next door. What the tree does not have is a story of its own. No newspaper, history page or municipal notice found so far names it; the register measures it and the comune's page confirms the cemetery and its hours, and that is the whole documentary record, which means its age is unknown rather than approximate. Deodar was a standard cemetery planting across nineteenth century Italy, an evergreen brought down from the Himalaya and chosen for the obvious associations, so a nineteenth century date is likely and unproven. Opening runs to half past five in winter and half past six in summer. It is a twenty minute walk from the centro storico, or a short bus ride.
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8
The Cypress of Parco della Cuparella
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · Centro Storico
The park this cypress stands in used to be where people dumped things. Perugians called the slope Il Campaccio, roughly the bad field, a steep and disused strip against the medieval walls, and in the 1950s the comune handed it to the Tuscan landscape architect Pietro Porcinai, who turned it into a public garden. The nickname stuck anyway. The Mediterranean cypress here measures 293 centimetres round and 21 metres tall, and it is the closest monumental tree to the centre of Perugia, a couple of hundred metres from Piazza Italia and Piazza dell'Universita, which makes it the one to start or finish a walk on. Cypress is the least surprising tree in Umbria and the most useful. It takes thin, fast draining soil, exactly the conditions on a slope like this one, and its narrow column is the reason Italian hillsides look the way they do in every painting of them. Whether this tree predates Porcinai's redesign or went in as part of it is not recorded, and neither the register nor FAI's heritage listing for the park says. Nobody has published an age. What is on record is the site: free, open, built along the city walls, with the valley below it and the old town directly above.
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9
The North Oak of Strada del Gioco
Downy Oak (Quercus pubescens) · Prepo
Downy oak is the tree Umbrian hillsides are made of, and hardly any of them get this big. Quercus pubescens takes the dry limestone slopes that better oaks refuse, usually as a modest, crooked, hard-used tree of field edges and scrub. This one is 430 centimetres around and 21 metres tall, which put it on Italy's national monumental register on size alone. It is not even alone: a second oak within eight centimetres of the same girth stands 150 metres down the lane.
Strada del Gioco runs through Prepo, on the slope roughly three kilometres southwest of the walled centre. Perugia's other monumental trees are a nineteenth century story, cedars planted as the city laid out gardens over the ground where the papal fortress had stood. These two are the older landscape showing through: field oaks left where they were while the land around them changed use, which is how a good many large roverelle in central Italy came to survive.
The species is worth knowing in winter. Downy oak is marcescent, tending to hold its dead leaves on the lower branches through the cold months instead of dropping them, so the crown keeps a rustling copper brown long after the rest of the hillside has gone bare.
Italy's register is the only source that names this tree, and it gives a girth, a height and a position and no age, so the numbers here are the register's own and the pin is marked approximate.
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10
The South Oak of Strada del Gioco
Downy Oak (Quercus pubescens) · Prepo
The two oaks of Strada del Gioco differ by eight centimetres of girth and one metre of height, and they stand 150 metres apart. This is the thinner and taller of the pair: 422 centimetres around, 22 metres up, and nothing at all on record about its age.
Part of what a downy oak is worth in Umbria is what grows under it. Quercus pubescens is one of central Italy's classic truffle hosts, the fungus forming on oak roots in exactly the limestone soils these trees favour, and a productive oak is a tree with an argument for being left standing when a hillside gets cleared. Whether that is this particular tree's biography, nobody has written down.
Prepo is a working edge of Perugia rather than a monument to it, about three kilometres southwest of the centre and 370 metres up. There is no garden here, no plaque and no gate, just two very large oaks on a lane, which is a different sort of pleasure from the cedars that hold the city's squares. Come in winter for the second one: downy oak hangs onto its dead leaves through the cold months, and a copper crown on a bare slope carries a long way.
Nobody has dated either oak. Italy's register has no age column and no second source names them, so what exists is a girth, a height and a point on a map, and the point is good to within a lane rather than a trunk.
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