The Historic Collection of Parco delle Colombare

A large mulberry anchors what remains of a private estate's tree collection, one of the oldest specimens documented in Parco delle Colombare, a hillside park whose ownership shifted repeatedly before the city bought it in 1967 and opened it to the public. Named for Villa Colombari, built by a merchant who traded in the ochre earth pigments quarried on the property, the park's grounds were surveyed in 1946 and found to hold some 260 tall trees in its wooded section alone, alongside a working agricultural strip of grapevines, olives, cherries, pears and quinces that has since faded but left its own trace on the landscape. Alongside the mulberry, the collection that survives today runs to hornbeam, beech, tulip tree, ginkgo, an Australian sterculia, a California incense cedar and both Mediterranean and Kashmir cypress, an unusually wide-ranging planting for a single hillside estate. No individual specimen's exact age is documented beyond the general age of the collection itself, but the range of species alone marks this out as a genuine 19th and early 20th century private arboretum, now free and open to anyone willing to walk the hill above Verona's historic centre.