Paolo Volpi was a professor of botany at the Lucca University Secondary School. In 1822 he was appointed the first director of the Lucca Botanical Gardens, recently founded under Duchess Maria Luisa of Bourbon. In this role, he was active in enriching the collections of the gardens, for which he also instituted a school of botany, where the plants were placed in systematic order. He also had an octagonal pool built for the garden's water supply. In 1822 he planted the tree that is still today the symbol of the Garden: a Cedar of Lebano (Cedrus libani) that measures over 6 m in circumference, has a height of 22 meters and foliage with a surface area of over 500 m 2 .