The Chir Pine of Colle Oppio

The roots of this pine have grown into Nero's palace. It stands on Colle Oppio directly above the Domus Aurea, and somewhere below it in the dark they have worked into the nymphaeum of Ulysses and Polyphemus. It is not a Roman tree in any sense. The Chir Pine belongs to the Himalayan foothills, and this one was carried back from there by Giuseppe Tucci, the Tibetologist and Mussolini-era envoy who spent the 1930s travelling in Tibet and Nepal. It was already standing when the Colle Oppio garden was inaugurated in 1936, which makes it at least ninety years old and one of the very few of its species in the city. Italy's monumental register added it in October 2025 on the grounds of botanical rarity alone: 290 centimetres around, 20 metres tall. The caveat is real and belongs in the same breath. Those roots are a genuine problem for the ruin underneath, and plans to redesign the garden above the Domus Aurea have been reported as intending to take out the tall trees over the excavation for exactly that reason. The press had already written this tree off as dying once. The register's most recent check, in late 2025, found it alive and in good health. Both things hold: it is doing well, and it is standing on ground where the archaeology has the stronger claim.