The Great Camphor Tree of Via Romolo Gessi

One number makes this tree interesting, and the same number is the reason to be careful about it. The national monumental tree register lists a Nepal camphor tree on Via Romolo Gessi in Cornigliano with a trunk 734 centimetres round, about 2.3 metres through, and 24 metres tall. For comparison, the other specimens of Cinnamomum glanduliferum turned up around Genoa measure 487 centimetres at Villa Tigullio in Rapallo and between 350 and 392 at Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli. This one is half as thick again as the next largest, which makes it either a genuinely extraordinary tree or a digit that slipped in a spreadsheet. Only the register carries it. No photograph, no second measurement, no local article, which is why no superlative is claimed for it here. Nepal camphor comes from the Himalaya and southwest China, and it reached Genoese gardens in the nineteenth century, when shipping money was buying exotics by the crate and the western districts of Cornigliano and Sampierdarena still had the villa grounds to put them in, long before heavy industry took that shoreline. The age, roughly 150 to 250 years, is estimated from the trunk. The pin is approximate. Go and look, and if the trunk really is that wide, we would like to hear it.