The Podocarp of Piazza Vittorio

Italy put this tree on its national monumental register in October 2025 for one reason: it should not be here. Podocarpus neriifolius grows wild in the forests of the Himalayan foothills and southeast Asia, and Rome holds very few of any size. This is one of the largest, 230 centimetres around and 20 metres tall, in the public garden inside Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. Its age is not known. No planting record survives and neither register that lists it carries a date, so a century, give or take, is as precise as anyone can honestly be. The square around it was laid out in the 1880s for the new capital's civil servants, in an arcaded Turinese style that still makes this corner of Rome look imported from somewhere else, and a garden of exotic trees was exactly what that decade planted. It has stood through the more restless version of Rome. The square's ruined fountain, the Trofei di Mario, sits a few steps away and predates it by seventeen centuries. The food market that filled the arcades for a hundred years packed up and moved around the corner in 2001. The neighbourhood became the most polyglot in the city. The podocarp, evergreen and unbothered, looks much the same in February as in August. Its health was recorded as good in November 2025.