The Fernleaf Beech of Palazzo Doria-Tursi

Genoa's city hall has a beech in its courtyard, and its leaves are wrong. This is Fagus sylvatica 'Asplenifolia', a cut-leaved sport of the ordinary European beech whose foliage comes out narrow and deeply slashed, closer to a fern frond than to the broad oval leaf the species is known for. The national monumental tree register records it at 230 centimetres round and 21 metres tall, which puts its crown level with the palace's upper windows. Palazzo Doria-Tursi was built in 1565 for the banker Niccolo Grimaldi, passed to the Doria family in 1596, was later bought by the Republic of Genoa, and has been the seat of the city's government since 1848. The tree is far younger than the walls around it. Nobody has dated it: no source gives a planting year, and the 100 to 180 year range here is worked back from the trunk alone, so read it as an order of magnitude rather than a number. A courtyard planting from the municipal era would fit the size, but that is inference, not record. It stands inside one of the Rolli palaces on Via Garibaldi, the UNESCO-listed street of Genoese banking houses, in a courtyard that now also serves the Strada Nuova Museums. Turn off the street and it is there between the arcades, a lace-leaved tree in a stone box.