Why Tuscany Is Full of Cypress Trees
Why the cypress trees in Tuscany were planted and how they came to mean death.
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Every year on the second of November, people in Italy head to the cemetery to pay their homage to the dead.
My father used to take me to visit my nonno. November 2nd is a memento mori for the whole country, but it was especially true for me. ANTONIO CANGIANO was staring right at me on a tombstone. (I was named after my grandpa, as it’s tradition in Italy.)
The large Roman cemetery where he was buried was surrounded by endless cypress trees. Further, fellow Romans around me would often use the expression, “andare agli alberi pizzuti,” referring to the cypresses as a euphemism for dying.
So I came to associate that particular tree with death very early in life.
Around six or so, I saw a picture of Val d’Orcia in Tuscany and asked my dad why it had so many cypress trees around regular houses, not cemeteries.
My dad never completed third grade but was a man of great culture. He opened a successful bookstore in Ostia and would essentially read nonstop. So the answer I got was, in hindsight, detailed and historically accurate.
In this article, I’ll tell you the short, grown-up version.
Cypresses as markers
When you see those tidy rows climbing a ridge, all the way to a house, those trees act as fences.
As you drive up to the area, it’s all picturesque, and you might mistakenly assume they are there for decoration. Narrow, tall, and easy to grow, cypresses were more of a marker of territory, as they could easily be seen from two hills away. A tool that has kept neighboring farmers on friendly terms for centuries.
Two of them a few feet apart? Good chance that’s a gate. A double file running up a road, that’s the driveway to a property somebody owns. If you interpret the land this way, you’ll quickly see that they are not placed randomly. They are a surveying instrument with the added benefit of breaking the wind along the edges of grain fields.
The tree, by the way, is not native to the area, but Cupressus sempervirens has likely been growing in Tuscany since Etruscan times, seven centuries before Jesus was born. Today they feel intrinsically Tuscan, but they actually came by boat from Greece and Phoenicia.
Siena’s investment
Val d’Orcia came about as an investment by wealthy Sienese merchants in the 14th and 15th centuries. They built the farmhouses in commanding positions to supervise, and planted cypresses to delineate the land. Then they rented it to tenants under *mezzadria*, a sharecropping arrangement with the farmers. Good governance and a pleasing aesthetic were the goal. Today, that’s recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and housing in the area remains an investment.
The death came before the cemeteries
The Greeks and the Romans called the cypress the mourning tree long before modern cemeteries existed.
Ovid gave the association its most famous telling in the Metamorphoses, where Cyparissus felt grief for killing a tame stag, and turned into the tree. Roman funerals used the branches and made wreaths for Pluto.
Symbolically, it made sense that an evergreen tree was a stand-in for a soul that never ends.
What really made it the widespread cemetery marker that it is today is Napoleon’s Edict of Saint-Cloud, dated June 12, 1804, which made it illegal to bury bodies in churches or within city walls.
Two years later, the edict reached the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and all of a sudden, thousands of towns needed a walled area past the last houses.
The cypress was the obvious answer because the tree didn’t require much land, was cheap, fast to grow, narrow, and evergreen. Plus, it was already the standard boundary tree, and it already carried funerary meaning.
Plots of land were surrounded by cypresses and designated as cemeteries. Easily visible from two hills away.
It’s a (bird) trap
One of the most photographed cypress groves in Tuscany is the Cipressini di San Quirico d’Orcia. This cluster of cypresses does not seem to follow the usual pattern. It’s not a cemetery, and it doesn’t mark a field or a driveway. A leading theory is that it was used as a bird trap. The trees would attract birds, and then a person would set a net and panic them into the mesh. This practice was made illegal in the late 1960s, but the trees were left standing. Others ascribe more decorative origins to it.
Two more things
Two plot twists that make the cypress in Italy story even more interesting.
In 2011, the comune (municipality) of San Quirico d’Orcia added a regulation over commercial use of images of its territory. In practice, tourists and journalists were exempted, but advertisers and people using the images for commercial purposes became the target.
The effort by Roberto Rappuoli, the mayor at the time, was to stop people from appropriating imagery of the valley for products and campaigns with no connection to it.
Then in 2013, he had to send a cease-and-desist to McDonald’s over the Gran Chianina burger campaign. It used the famous cypresses and a hilltop farmhouse as a backdrop. McDonald’s replied that it had meant the campaign as a tribute to the region, and offered to promote San Quirico d’Orcia to its 720K Facebook followers. The controversy faded from there.
Seiridium cardinale, a canker fungus from California, was first identified in Florence in 1951 and spread through most of Italy within two decades. By the 1970s, researchers at the CNR in Florence had started breeding resistant clones. The first ones were patented in 1990.
So the oldest symbol of immortality in the Mediterranean now comes with a patent number.
My father gave me the Sienese investors, the trees as markers, and Ovid. He never mentioned the fungus, or that some of those trees would be replaced by patented copies.
He couldn’t have. The lab in Florence was still working on it.
Great stuff. They also sort of constructed, so the entire postcard scene everyone photographs is like a late medieval Disneyland landscape. I wrote about it here btw →
We have more than a dozen Italian cypresses around the perimeter of our backyard. They’re very drought tolerant and can live to be hundreds of years old. Stately, elegant survivors. They lend a natural architectural element to the landscape.