The Cedar of Lebanon at Croce Rossa

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.