The Quercia del Tasso

Local tradition gives this oak a thousand years. No dendrologist has ever confirmed the number, so take it as legend, not fact. What is documented is the company it kept. Torquato Tasso, dying of tuberculosis in the convent of Sant'Onofrio next door, reportedly rested in its shade during his final weeks in 1595. Two centuries later Giacomo Leopardi came to sit under the same branches. In the 1600s, followers of the Roman priest Filippo Neri cut an open-air amphitheater into the slope beside it, still called the Anfiteatro Quercia del Tasso. Guglielmo Marconi favored the spot on his visits to the city. The tree's modern life has been rough: lightning split it in 1843, and in 2011 someone deliberately set it on fire. A 1929 fountain at its base carries a line from Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered. Rome's own city museum now describes what stands here as what remains of a monumental tree, an honest label for a tree that has survived a poet's death, a lightning strike and an arsonist, roughly in that order.