The Lie Tree of Quasano

Quasano calls its holm oak the Lie Tree. The name is a leftover complaint: after Italian unification, peasants gathered under its crown to trade grievances about promises the Garibaldian patriots had made and never kept, and the bitterness became the tree's name. Nobody recorded a planting date, but its absence from the estate's own land records before the mid-1800s land divisions is the closest thing to a birth certificate it has, putting it at somewhere over a century and a half old. It stands exactly where it would have overheard those complaints, right in front of the gate of Quasano's old baronial masseria, positioned so awkwardly that carts once had to work around it to get through. A small chapel, later folded into a university building, faces it from across the way. At 3.2 metres round and 11 metres tall, it earned a place on Puglia's register of monumental trees in 2021, protected under the national law for trees of exceptional age, size or history. Italians have nominated it to the FAI's Places of the Heart campaign seven times since 2006, an unusually long streak of affection for a tree named after lying. The gate it blocks now leads to nothing grander than divided smallholdings, the old estate broken up long ago. The tree outlasted the arrangement it complained about.