The Cypress Avenue of Giardino Giusti

A long avenue of cypresses climbs from the Renaissance palace at the garden's entrance toward a grotto and grotesque stone mask at the far end, the single axis around which Agostino Giusti built his entire garden after 1570, using forced perspective to make the walk feel longer and grander than the plot of land actually allows. For over two centuries the most famous tree in that avenue was a single cypress that had already stood for hundreds of years when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited in 1786 and admired it enough to record the moment in his own Italian Journey. That specific tree no longer exists. A violent storm on 23 August 2020 tore it from the ground entirely, ending a run of more than six hundred years and taking with it the garden's single most photographed feature. The garden has since replanted cypresses along the same historic line, younger and considerably shorter than what fell, alongside the surviving older specimens elsewhere in the row that the storm did not reach. Visiting today means walking the same axis Goethe walked, framed by the same design, honestly no longer beneath the exact tree that made it famous.