The Mangiafumo of Piazza Umberto I

Bari calls this one la mangiafumo, the smoke-eater, on the local conviction that it swallows the traffic fumes of the streets around it. That part is folklore. What is not folklore is the base: three metres around, swollen into a grey elephantine foot that stores water, sitting in a public garden two minutes from the central station. Nolina longifolia is a Mexican plant from dry limestone slopes at altitude, and the specimens Europe planted as ornamental curiosities in its gardens almost all stayed modest. This one did not. Three metres of girth under four and a half metres of height was enough for the Puglia and the national registers to list it as a monumental tree, one of only four in the whole of Bari and one of 74 in the region. A second of those four, the ombu, stands a few metres away in the same bed, so a visitor can see half of the city's officially remarkable trees without turning around. The gardens around it were made by merging two 19th-century ones and rebuilt in 1905 around the equestrian statue of Umberto I. The mangiafumo's own arrival went unrecorded. It lays down no countable rings and no planting date has surfaced, so it comes to this page without even a range. If you know when it went in, tell us.