The Cypress of Parco della Cuparella

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.