The Olive Tree of San Servolo

This olive tree grows in a garden originally planted to stock a pharmacy, on an island whose most recent past was Italy's largest asylum for the criminally insane. Benedictine monks are documented on San Servolo from at least the 8th century, and the garden they and later religious orders built up over a thousand years carries more than 400 tree species today, including Canary palms, agaves and a Chusan palm alongside the century-old olive tree, planted originally for medicinal use when the island supplied remedies to the Venetian military. The asylum operated from the 18th century until its closure in 1978, a history now documented in the island's own Museo del Manicomio, and the contrast between that clinical past and the freely walkable garden that surrounds it is part of what makes a visit here unusual. No source gives this specific olive tree an exact planting date, so its precise age is unverified, but its description as secolare, century-old, is consistent across the records checked. Venice International University now occupies much of the island.