The Second Cemetery Cypress of Piano di Sorrento

Sorrento's other cemetery cypress measures 2.66 metres round. This one is thicker: 3.25 metres, the widest trunk the national register lists in Piano di Sorrento's Cimitero Comunale, registered as Cipresso n. 2 alongside two siblings. The dating is the same local testimony that covers all three: verbal accounts place the planting in 1876, the year the cemetery itself opened, which the Regione Campania's own card repeats and calls over 130 years old at its last update, nearer 150 now. No document backs the year, only memory passed down with the ground. At over three metres round, an Italian cypress this thick reads as a squat column rather than the narrow dark spire the species is usually planted as elsewhere on the peninsula. The two official surveys of this tree, the national register and the regional card, disagree by 25 to 30 metres on exactly where in the cemetery it stands, so the pin here is honestly approximate rather than exact. Piano di Sorrento's municipal cemetery is free and open through the comune's daylight hours, one Circumvesuviana stop from Sorrento station and about fifteen minutes on foot up Via Gennaro Maresca, the same walk as its two sibling cypresses.