The Cedar of Lebanon of Villa Torlonia

No cedar on Rome's monumental register is thicker than this one. Six metres around the trunk, 28 metres up, standing beside the staircase Giuseppe Valadier designed for the Casino Nobile. The surveyor who wrote its entry reached for the word guardiano. Nobody knows when it was planted, and that is worth saying plainly, because the register carries a girth for it and no birth year at all. What exists instead is the estate's history. The Torlonia family bought the grounds in 1797, and the English-style landscaping that brought ornamental conifers into Roman villas came later in the nineteenth century. That puts the cedar somewhere between 150 and 220 years old, which is an inference from the garden rather than a date from a document. Its neighbours have been unusual. The park holds a pink granite obelisk the cedar now rivals for height, a mock-medieval house covered in owls, and from 1925 to 1943 Mussolini, who rented the whole estate as his private residence for a token sum. The villa was occupied, then left to fall apart for decades, then repaired and opened as a public park. The cedar came through all of it standing where it stands now. Roma Capitale's own description of the villa calls it colossal, which for once is not municipal enthusiasm. It was measured again in March 2026 and found in good health.