The Hackberries of Piazza Vasari

In November 2025 Italy's state railway announced it would fell twenty one trees in this small square to rebuild the nearby Ponte al Pino bridge: fifteen hackberries, two maples, two planes, two holm oaks. This cluster of three hackberries was not among them. Tuscany's own monumental tree register had already flagged two of the piazza's oldest hackberries as protected, and local reporting on the works stated plainly that the pine and the historic trees would not be touched. Almost everything else nearby came down. These stayed. The three stand together in one garden bed in Piazza Giorgio Vasari, a residential square in Campo di Marte, easy to mistake for an ordinary planting until you look at the trunks. The largest measures just over four metres round and rises about eighteen and a half metres, with two slightly smaller companions beside it, at just under four metres and three and a half metres round. Italy's national monumental tree register lists all three separately, cross checked here against Tuscany's own citizen register, which recorded the largest still in good health as recently as October 2025, weeks before the felling notice went out. Nobody has recorded their age: hackberries can stand for centuries unremarked, and this entry will not guess where it cannot measure. What is documented is rarer than age, a protection order that held, in a square minutes from a busy railway station with nothing between you and the trunks but open grass.