The Holm Oak of Villa Fondi

Three metres and eighteen centimetres round, and it stops at eleven metres tall. This holm oak spent its life spreading instead of climbing, on a terrace above Piano di Sorrento with the Bay of Naples in front of it and Vesuvius across the water. The ground belonged to Giovanni Andrea De Sangro, Prince of Fondi, who built the villa in 1840. The garden around it was laid out in 1875. Italy's national monumental-tree register and the Regione Campania's own card for this oak agree on its measurements to the centimetre and put its age at roughly 150 years, which would make it a planting of that first garden or something a little later. Nobody has counted the rings, so the date stays an approximation, exactly as the register leaves it. The villa passed to the comune, was restored in the 1990s and now holds the Georges Vallet archaeological museum, so the oak keeps company with Roman finds dug out of the peninsula. The park is free to walk. One thing to expect: the two official records place this tree about 60 metres apart, both inside the same small park, so the pin gets you to the terrace rather than to the trunk. It is a short look around. The tree is in Piano di Sorrento, not in Sorrento itself: one Circumvesuviana stop from Sorrento station, then ten minutes on foot.