The Stone Pine of the Bobolino

Stone pines are known for their width, not their height. This one is 31.5 metres tall. The umbrella pine gives the Italian skyline its flat-topped silhouette, and it usually does that from a bare trunk of ten or fifteen metres. The Bobolino pine has gone up as well as out, with a trunk of 412 centimetres around, standing on the Oltrarno hillside among the villas and small parks that cover the slope south of the river. Two other protected trees stand within fifty metres of it, so getting to all three costs nothing more than turning around. One caution about those numbers, though a smaller one than it used to be. RAMI, Italy's separate registry of monumental trees, later surveyed this pine independently and came back with a height of 31.60 metres against the national register's 31.5, close enough to read as confirmation rather than disagreement. No age has ever been published for it. A stone pine carries cones that take three years to ripen, which means the ground beneath it holds cones at every stage at once, green and closed, grey and opening, and spent. The nuts inside are pinoli, the ones that go into pesto, and prising them out of the shell is why they cost what they cost.