Thirty meters high, over twenty-one meters in circumference and a crown that extends fifty meters in diameter. The Ficus macrophylla of the Garibaldi Garden in Piazza Marina, in the Kalsa district, is considered by the Georgofili Academy to be the largest exotic tree in Europe. It is not a recent record, given that the specimen was planted in 1864, a year after the creation of the garden designed by the architect Giovan Battista Filippo Basile, and has not stopped growing since then.
Coming from the multiplication of the specimen present in the Botanical Garden of Palermo – where it had arrived in 1845 from the Howe Islands in the Pacific, through a French nursery – the ficus has grown to the point of distorting the original layout of the garden. Its branches produce aerial roots that descend towards the ground and, once they reach the ground, become real additional trunks, natural pillars that support an increasingly greater weight. It is this characteristic that gives it the “heartbreaking” appearance that distinguishes it – and the same mechanism, in nature, leads the Ficus macrophylla to slowly suffocate the trees on which it sprouts, which is why it is also called the “crush tree”. The children of Palermo have always called it differently: “the walking tree”.
A square built on blood
The ficus was planted by the then mayor Marquis di Rudinì in the aftermath of Garibaldi’s revolution, with a precise intent, that is to erase with green the red of the blood of the 188 martyrs executed in the spectacular “auto da fé” organized by the Spanish Inquisition in that very square. The last fires were held in front of Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, the building that stands in front of the garden and which was the seat of the Inquisition Tribunal for over two centuries. Popular tradition says that the blood-soaked soil contributed to the tree’s impressive growth — a legend, to be sure, but one rooted in documented historical facts.
The municipality of Palermo recognizes the ficus as one of the oldest and largest in Italy and named the garden after the national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi to celebrate the birth of the Kingdom of Italy. In 2011 the tree received the title of “Tree of the 150 years of the Unification of Italy” and in 2016 it was registered in the national register of monumental trees pursuant to Law no. 10/2013.
The policeman and the ambush
The most recent history of the tree bears a precise date. At 8.45pm on Friday 12 March 1909, three gunshots in rapid succession and a fourth fired immediately afterwards caused panic in the small crowd waiting for the tram at the terminus in Piazza Marina. Only the young sailor Alberto Cardella rushed towards the Garibaldi Garden, where the shots had come from, in time to see a man slowly fall to the ground, and two others flee, disappearing into the shadows.
The man was Joe Petrosino, a New York police lieutenant, born in Padula in the province of Salerno in 1860 (a figure to whom the Rai TV mini series was dedicated in 2006 Joe Petrosinowith Beppe Fiorello). He led a team of Italian-American agents tasked with combating the “Black Hand”, the criminal system based on extortion and intimidation which mainly affected Italian emigrants themselves. He had arrived in Palermo to collect information on the criminal records of some Italian criminals who had emigrated to the United States, so as to facilitate their expulsion from the country. A classified mission, which became public due to a news leak.
The US consul in Palermo telegraphed to his government: «Petrosino shot dead in the center of the city this evening. The unknown killers. A martyr dies.” The instigator, according to investigators of the time and subsequent reconstructions, was almost certainly the boss Vito Cascio Ferro. The Municipality of Palermo placed a plaque in the garden of Villa Garibaldi in 2003 to commemorate the place of the murder. At Petrosino’s funeral in New York on April 12, 1909, approximately 250,000 people marched.
