The Cedar of Lebanon at 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.