What is the oldest tree in Perugia?
The oldest tree in Perugia that carries a date is the Cedar of Lebanon in the cloister of Palazzo Murena, planted around 1861 and so roughly 165 years old. It is free to walk in and see, in the courtyard of the university's rectorate in the historic centre. The holm oaks of the Giardini del Frontone are almost certainly older, since the gardens were laid out from 1707 and a local history piece describes them as already grown when papal troops sacked the city in 1859, but no source puts a number on them.
Perugia's trees are unusually well recorded for Italy, and the reason is that most of them stand on ground the city or the university has managed for over a century. Italy's national register gives girth, height and position and no age at all, so every date here comes from university records, the comune's own pages or local history writing, and where none of those has an answer the page leaves the age blank rather than estimating it. Six of the twelve are cedars or their close relatives, planted as Perugia laid out the public gardens that replaced the papal fortress, which is why the species repeats and the stories do not. The Frontone entry covers two registered holm oaks about seventy metres apart in the same gardens, so its pin is marked approximate: one point cannot honestly stand for both. Four trees here, the two Prepo oaks, the Strada dei Conservoni oak and the Ponte Felcino cypress, are register-only, with no second source and no age. One further register tree is missing on purpose, a holm oak in the cloister of Santa Giuliana, now the Italian Army's language school and not normally open to visitors.
One of Perugia's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest.