The Farnia of Mantignano

Local memory says a soldier planted this oak the day he came home. Artemio Berti is supposed to have put it in the ground in Mantignano in 1917, back from fighting in the First World War, on what was then open land on Florence's western edge. Tuscany's own citizen tree register repeats the story, though as oral testimony rather than a written record, and it does not quite agree with itself: a growth-rate estimate on the same page puts the tree at around 126 years, which would date the planting closer to 1900, nearly two decades before Berti is said to have come home. Nobody has settled which is right, so this page gives the range rather than picking a number. What both surveys agree on is the tree itself: a single pedunculate oak grown standing alone, its trunk about 3.6 metres round and its crown reaching some 18 metres, healthy as of an inspection in October 2025. It is Florence's second farnia, a different tree from the older one at the Ippodromo delle Cascine 2.4 kilometres away, and it still stands where Berti is said to have left it, on an ordinary residential street that has grown up around it since.