The Cedar of Celimontana

A few meters from Villa Celimontana's Aleppo pine grows its opposite in almost every way: straight where the pine leans, dense and dark where the pine is sparse, native to a mountain range a thousand kilometers further east. This cedar of Lebanon is one of two of Rome's officially monumental trees inside the villa, both standing along Viale Cardinale Francesco Spellman near the main entrance at Piazza della Navicella. Ciriaco Mattei began turning the site's vineyards into an ornamental garden in 1572, and cedars of Lebanon, prized in noble Roman gardens for their biblical associations with endurance, show up across the city's hilltop villas from the 1600s onward. No record fixes the year this particular tree went into the ground, only its registry status as a monumental specimen for its age, dimensions and form, so this account treats its age as undocumented rather than claim a number it cannot back. The villa passed to the Italian Geographical Society in 1926 and became public parkland in 1928, and the cedar, whatever its exact age, has outlasted every institution that has owned the ground beneath it.