The Ginkgo of Piazza Cavour

Piazza Cavour was Bologna's first deliberately designed public garden-square, laid out by the Turin architect Pietro Ceri in the years after Italian unification cut new streets through the city's medieval fabric, and this ginkgo has stood in it since roughly that original planting, around 150 years now. It is, by the official register's own measurements, the smallest of Bologna's monumental trees by height, 29.5 metres against taller planes and cedars elsewhere in the city, and its trunk runs 338cm around, but no other tree on this list turns quite the same colour: every autumn its fan-shaped leaves shift to a uniform, near-luminous yellow within days of each other, a synchronised display few other species manage. The square has a more recent claim to local affection too. Bolognese singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla lived facing Piazza Cavour for much of his life, and this ginkgo, visible from his own windows for decades, has become informally associated with him since his death in 2012, a civic tree with an unusually specific personal thread running through its more official designation.