The Poet's Holm Oak of Montesignano

The civic group that runs computer lessons in this corner of Genoa named itself after a tree: Il Leccio di via Mogadiscio, the holm oak of Via Mogadiscio. That is what a neighbourhood landmark looks like when it appears on no tourist map. The oak stands in Montesignano in the eastern hills, near the church of San Michele Arcangelo, and both the national register and Liguria's separate regional list carry it, which is rarer than it sounds. They agree on 257 centimetres of girth and 15 metres of height, and the region records the reason for protection as historical, cultural and religious value rather than size. Genoese sources connect the tree to Camillo Sbarbaro, the poet of Pianissimo who spent his other working life as one of Italy's serious amateur lichenologists, collecting the lichens that grow on exactly this kind of old bark. We have not found the line or the poem, so treat the literary link as a local attribution rather than a quotable fact. Its age is unrecorded too. Italy's national register carries no age field for any entry anywhere in the country, so the 150 to 300 year span comes off the trunk and nothing else. Holm oak is evergreen, dark and hard-leaved, which means it looks much the same in January as in July, and it drops acorns sweeter than most oaks in autumn.