The Pine of Via del Pino

This stone pine did not move onto a street named after it. The street took its name from the tree, and Via del Pino in the Florentine suburb of Coverciano has pointed at this one trunk for longer than anyone recorded. It stands squeezed onto the pavement between apartment buildings and small shops, its trunk swollen to more than four metres round and its crown rising almost thirty metres above the rooftops, the kind of scale that makes an ordinary residential street feel briefly like a piazza. Nobody has dated it. Stone pines grow at wildly different rates depending on how they are pruned and crowded, and no comparable local tree offered a growth curve to estimate from, so the honest answer is that it has simply outlasted the memory of whoever planted it. Two published surveys of Tuscany's veteran trees, Patriarchi vegetali and Toscana cento alberi da salvare, both singled it out, and Italy's own forestry ministry lists it on the national monumental tree register under its street address alone, because the tree and the address are the same fact. It has watched Coverciano grow up around it rather than the other way round. Shops opened beside it, buildings rose to its shoulders, buses started stopping two minutes from its base, and it kept standing on the sidewalk it was there for first.