The Pine of Carrassi

A branch on this Aleppo pine broke off in a heavy snowfall about two decades ago, and Bari's foresters simply cut the stump flush and left the rest standing, close to six metres round at the trunk. It grows in a fenced bed on a street corner in Carrassi, behind a low concrete wall low enough that generations of neighbourhood kids have climbed over it and up the tree itself, which the local paper reports as an open secret rather than a problem anyone has stopped. The tree is one of only four in the whole of Bari that Puglia's monumental register recognises, though even the record argues with itself about what it is: the official listing calls it an Aleppo pine, a separate botanical survey calls the same tree a stone pine, and nobody has resolved which. A University of Bari botanist puts its age at roughly a century and a half, the same estimate he gives for a second monumental tree across town, while warning in the same breath that dating either one precisely is close to impossible. Do not confuse it with the pine that stood one intersection further along the same street and was felled in 2025. This one, at the De Gasperi corner with Via Ugo La Malfa, is still there.