The Plane Tree of Piazza Camerlata

Piazzale Camerlata is where Como's traffic converges, and a plane tree with a trunk four and a third metres around stands in the middle of it. Two registers agree on that figure almost to the centimetre: the national monumental list records 430 centimetres and the Italian tree register 4.30 metres. They part company only on the Latin name, one calling it Platanus x acerifolia and the other Platanus hispanica, which are two names for the same hybrid rather than two different trees. Neither publishes an age. A search of the local press turned up a good deal about the square and nothing at all about the tree, so how much of the junction's history it has actually stood through is anybody's guess. The square has plenty of it. Camerlata was a commercial crossroads on the old Via Regina by the fifteenth century, took its present shape in 1879 and now centres on a monumental fountain by Cesare Cattaneo and Mario Radice. The Italian register surveyed the plane in September 2025 and rated its condition good, which is the most recent evidence that it is thriving rather than merely standing. It is a separate errand from the lakefront villas, about 2.9 kilometres south of them, twenty minutes on foot from Como San Giovanni or a short ride by bus. Free, at any hour, in the way a public square is free.