The Cedar of Piazza Bra

This cedar has stood beside the Roman Arena for longer than most of the buildings currently ringing the square around it. Piazza Bra got its first deliberate garden in 1870, when the city decided the space needed shade and elegance to match its role as Verona's civic heart, and laid out three circular flowerbeds around a central fountain in 1873. The cedar planted then is one of the last survivors of that original scheme, now nearly 20 metres tall and weighing an estimated 16 tonnes. In June 2025 a gardener from the municipal green-space agency noticed the ground around its roots lifting unnaturally, a warning sign that the tree could be at risk of toppling in one of the city's busiest public spaces. What followed was a genuine local drama, tracked across Veronese news outlets for weeks: engineers drove three anchor points some four metres into the ground, tied together by twenty steel piles set in concrete, stabilising the root plate without removing the tree. The work finished just before the mid-August holiday, and the cedar, by every account since, is healthy and expected to stand for decades more.