Tree Festival in Rome

An event for a city growing in the shade of its trees

The Tree Festival is the event through which the Municipality of Rome, together with the regional agency RomaNatura and Legambiente, celebrates National Tree Day, established by Italian law on November 21st. In the Lazio region, and particularly in the capital, this initiative takes on special significance: Rome is one of the European cities with the most extensive heritage of protected urban areas, a system of reserves and parks managed by RomaNatura within the municipal boundaries, including sites such as the Monte Mario Nature Reserve, Pineto Park, Valle dei Casali, and Marcigliana.

Two souls: public debate and planting

The Roman event is traditionally structured around two complementary fronts. The first is educational and takes place in the Loggia of Villa Mazzanti, the historic headquarters of RomaNatura at Via Gomenizza 81, in the Della Vittoria district just a stone's throw from Monte Mario: here, public meetings and round tables are held with researchers, technicians, and administrators. In 2025, the conference, organized with ISPRA, was dedicated to the theme «Trees in the urban environment: new scenarios and old critical issues», with an in-depth look at EU Regulation 2024/1991 on nature restoration, which commits member states to preventing the loss of urban green space by 2030 and increasing the tree canopy in cities.

The second front is that of direct action: in the Monte Mario Nature Reserve, the highest hill in Rome, tree-planting days and biodiversity workshops are held. Here, volunteers, employees of partner companies, students, and ordinary citizens plant young native trees and shrubs, learning to recognize the species of the Mediterranean scrub and the mixed Lazio woodland.

Legambiente's national campaign

The Roman Tree Festival is part of the national campaign that Legambiente has been promoting for thirty years: the 2025 edition celebrated its thirtieth anniversary with the slogan «Trees give us so much, now it's our turn» and over 120 reforestation initiatives in 14 Italian regions, carried out together with citizens, schools, businesses, and local administrations. Partners of the campaign include AzzeroCO₂, FRoSTA, INWIT, and Biorepack. In Rome, the preview on November 20, 2025, saw about seventy INWIT employees engaged in biodiversity workshops in the Monte Mario Reserve, as part of an action plan shared between Legambiente, INWIT, and RomaNatura that also includes a pilot project for monitoring fires in the capital's protected areas via telecommunication towers.

Why trees matter, in Rome more than elsewhere

• Air quality: tree canopies trap fine dust and pollutants, a concrete necessity in a metropolis with Rome's traffic.
• Heat islands: urban shading is one of the few effective defenses against the increasingly scorching summers in Lazio.
• Biodiversity: Roman reserves host birds of prey, woodpeckers, porcupines, and foxes just a few kilometers from the historic center.
• Struggling heritage: in Italian provincial capitals, there are on average only 24 trees per 100 inhabitants, a figure that pushes Legambiente to demand full implementation of the 2013 law on green spaces.

Who can participate

The meetings at Villa Mazzanti are free and open to everyone until capacity is reached, generally without the need for reservations. The activities in the reserves are designed primarily for schools, groups, and families: children are the ideal protagonists of a festival that, by definition, looks to future decades. Classes wishing to participate in the planting are invited to contact the RomaNatura environmental education office in advance, as the number of plants available is limited and agreed upon with nurseries and campaign partners.

An opportunity to discover Monte Mario

For those unfamiliar with the Monte Mario Nature Reserve, the Tree Festival is also the perfect excuse for a first visit. From the top of the hill — the famous «Monte Mario» which offers one of the widest views over Rome, with the dome of St. Peter's in the foreground — one can descend along paths shaded by holm oaks, downy oaks, and laurels. It is a fragment of the Roman countryside that survived the building expansion of the twentieth century, and the November day, with its low light and undergrowth colors, is perhaps the most beautiful time of the year to explore it.