The Stone Pine of Villa Fondi

In 2014 the WWF called the pines of Villa Fondi the last of their kind left standing in the built-up area on the tufa slope of Piano di Sorrento, and objected to a plan to cut them back hard. The Soprintendenza confirmed the villa and its park trees were protected. The pruning did not happen. This is the largest of them. It measures 4.18 metres round and twenty metres tall, carrying the flat spreading head that stone pines grow into once they have the room. The national register and the Regione Campania card give those figures identically and put the tree at around 150 years, presumably a planting of the garden laid out in 1875 around the De Sangro family's villa of 1840. Its health has been a local subject. A 2020 description of the garden mentions a big pine on the sea-facing western side, put at roughly 200 years old, attacked by bark beetles and saved by dendrosurgery. Whether that account is about this exact pine is not clear: it names a different pine species than the register does, and the garden may hold more than one old specimen. Nothing on record says the registered tree has gone. It stands in the same free public park as the holm oak, beside the Georges Vallet archaeological museum, in Piano di Sorrento. From Sorrento it is one Circumvesuviana stop and a ten-minute walk.