The Hackberries of the Aranciera

A hackberry in the holm oak wood behind the Museo Carlo Bilotti carries a nickname rather than a certificate: locals call it il bagolaro del Seicento, the hackberry of the 1600s, though nobody has run the rings to prove it. What is measured is its girth, about four metres around, matched almost exactly by a second trunk growing beside it, close enough that Italy's citizen tree registry logs them as a twinned pair rather than argue over which is which. Both stand in the Lecceta, a stretch of holm oak forest between the old citrus house, now a museum holding a de Chirico and Warhol collection, and the Muro Torto, the Aurelian era wall that has marked this edge of Rome since the third century. Villa Borghese holds roughly 350 trees and only a fraction have any official monumental status; a 2024 letter from the conservation group Amici di Villa Borghese named this hackberry as one of about 30 still waiting on the paperwork that would protect it. No source gives it exact coordinates, only a location inside the wood, so finding it means wandering the Lecceta rather than following a pin. That is true of most of Villa Borghese's older trees: the park has outlived several rounds of formal cataloguing without ever finishing one.