The Cypress of Ponte Felcino

Five metres and forty seven centimetres round is the largest trunk in Perugia's entire national tree register, and it belongs not to one of the city's celebrated garden cedars but to a cypress on a suburban street. The tree stands on Via Giacomo Puccini in Ponte Felcino, a district that grew up around a Tiber crossing and a railway junction rather than around a palace or a papal fortress, about four kilometres northeast of the historic centre and 200 metres above sea level, low ground for a Perugia register tree. Mediterranean cypress, Cupressus sempervirens, is the tall dark spire of Tuscan and Umbrian cemetery avenues and villa driveways, usually planted in disciplined rows for its shape rather than grown singly to a record size, which makes a single specimen this thick unusual rather than typical of the species. Nothing in the register says who planted it or when, and no second source names this particular tree, so it carries no age and stands flagged on the strength of one document. What the register does record is a girth that beats every cedar, oak and plane elsewhere on Perugia's list, by a wide margin. Whatever else is unknown about this cypress, its size on the page is not in question.