What is the oldest tree in Rome?

Rome has an older legend. The Quercia del Tasso on the Gianicolo is popularly said to be a thousand years old, tied to the poet Torquato Tasso, who tradition says rested in its shade before his death in 1595. No dendrologist has ever dated it, and this site treats that number as folklore rather than fact. Adonis has no such problem. Cardinal Scipione Borghese's gardener, Domenico Savini da Montepulciano, planted a row of oriental planes in the villa's private hunting park in the early 1600s, and the planting is documented well enough that Italian foresters count the survivors, nine of the original eleven, as the oldest confirmed trees in the city. Adonis is the largest of them, a hollow giant at the entrance to what is now called the Valley of the Plane Trees. In 2021 the garden cloned it from a single surviving leaf, a hedge against the fate of a neighboring oak from the same era that collapsed in 2018. Getting there: enter Villa Borghese from Via Pinciana and follow the signs for the Valle dei Platani.