The Cemetery Cypress of Piano di Sorrento

The cemetery opened in 1876, and by the account the register recorded this cypress went into the ground the same year. It has stood over every burial the place has ever had. That dating comes from local testimony rather than a document, which the Regione Campania card says openly; it calls the tree over 130 years old at its last update, which puts it near 150 now. Measured rather than remembered: 2.66 metres round and ten metres tall, figures the national register and the regional card give identically. At that girth an Italian cypress reads as a column rather than the thin dark spire the species is usually planted as. Two more cypresses in this same cemetery are on the national register, at 2.70 and 3.25 metres round, so the thickest trunk you see here is not this one. Go by the coordinates instead, and give yourself a minute: the two official records for this tree sit about 90 metres apart inside the grounds. Piano di Sorrento's municipal cemetery is a free, everyday public place, open through the daylight hours the comune sets, which shift with the season. It is a working cemetery, so the usual quiet applies. The walk is in Piano di Sorrento rather than Sorrento: one Circumvesuviana stop from Sorrento station, then about fifteen minutes uphill on Via Gennaro Maresca.