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.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Isola di San Servolo, 30124 Venezia
You can recognise it as the one olive in a garden of more than 400 species, among Canary palms and agaves. It was planted for the pharmacy the island once supplied.
Free, public park; separate paid ticket for the Museo del Manicomio
Vaporetto line 20 from San Zaccaria, about 10 minutes
In fruit
October to December: the harvest, when the fruit turns from green to black
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
