The Palazzo Murena Cedar

In 2020 a trumpeter and an accordionist played a concert twelve metres up in this tree. Paolo Fresu and Daniele di Bonaventura performed a set titled Two for Tree from the crown of the Atlas cedar in the cloister of Palazzo Murena, the rectorate of the University of Perugia, with the audience listening from the courtyard below. The tree could take it. It was planted just after Italian unification, around 1861, in the eclectic garden taste of that moment, and is somewhere between 150 and 185 years old depending on which source you ask. The national register gives 485 centimetres of girth and 25 metres of height; La Nazione measured it in 2021 at five metres round, 30 metres tall and 35 metres across the crown. Take either. It is the largest thing inside the cloister by a wide margin, and the walls it grew up between have kept it out of the wind for its whole life. Lightning found it anyway at some point, and left scars still visible on the trunk. Climbing arborists went up in October 2010 to prune it and consolidate the crown, and it was pronounced in excellent health in 2020, the year of the concert. The cloister is free and open during normal building hours, five minutes from Piazza IV Novembre, which makes this the easiest monumental tree in Perugia to reach and the least likely to be spotted from the street.