The Plane Tree of Piazza Minghetti

At 39.5 metres, this plane is the tallest of any monumental tree catalogued anywhere in Bologna's province, rising directly behind the bronze statue of the 19th century statesman Marco Minghetti that gives the square its name and its own local nickname for the tree, the guardian of the piazza. Its trunk measures 455cm around, respectable but not exceptional for a plane tree this old, which makes the height the genuinely remarkable figure: two centuries of growth in a confined city square, competing for light against surrounding buildings rather than spreading wide the way an open-park specimen might. The statue it now shades, sculpted by Giulio Monteverde and unveiled in 1896, commemorates a politician who served as Italy's Prime Minister in the 1860s, a piece of civic memory considerably younger than the tree standing over it. Piazza Minghetti sits inside Bologna's Quadrilatero, the tight medieval grid of streets and market stalls just east of Piazza Maggiore, making this one of the easiest monumental trees in the city to combine with an ordinary walk through the historic centre.