The Twin Planes of the Eleven Fountains

Two oriental planes here are older than the university that now owns them. Rome's Botanical Garden became a state institution in 1883, but the ground itself was a private garden of the Corsini family from 1660 onward, and these two trees, flanking Ferdinando Fuga's 1742 cascade of eleven fountains, were already mature when the last Corsini cardinals walked past them. Foresters place their age at over 300 years, among the oldest confirmed trees in Rome after Villa Borghese's plane grove. The staircase they frame, the Scalinata delle Undici Fontane, sends water down five stone basins toward eleven separate jets, an 18th-century flourish built as a backdrop for planting that already existed. The garden today holds 345 centuries-old specimens across 130 species, cork oaks, Himalayan cedars and Turkish oaks among them, but the two planes at the fountains remain the postcard image, framing water and stone the way they have for three centuries, regardless of which family or which state held the deed to the land around them.