The Magnolia of Via Corsini

Rome's oldest magnolia does not stand in a garden. It stands on the pavement of Via Corsini, outside the wall of the palace whose garden it was planted for, around the middle of the eighteenth century and roughly 275 years ago. The Orto Botanico next door, the obvious home for a tree like this, only became a public institution long after it was already in the ground. Southern magnolias had reached Europe from the American southeast only a few decades earlier, which made this one a collector's purchase rather than a street tree. It grew accordingly. The trunk measures 290 centimetres around and the crown reaches 18 metres, closer to a forest tree than to the clipped courtyard shrub the species usually settles for in Italy. Italy's monumental register lists it for age and for size, and for a magnolia that pairing is rare. What it has watched is mostly the boundary in front of it changing hands: a cardinal's private grounds turning into a state botanical collection, and Trastevere turning from the edge of the city into the middle of it. Surveyors looked it over in late 2025 and recorded its health as good. In May and June it does the thing the species was imported for, opening cream-white flowers the size of a spread hand, high up and out of reach, and heavy enough with scent that most people smell it before they look up.