The Nepal Camphor of Via Barsanti e Matteucci

A Himalayan tree on a street named after an engine. Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci patented their internal combustion engine in 1854, working between Lucca and Florence, and the city gave them this road. The largest thing standing on it is a Cinnamomum glanduliferum from the forests of Nepal, northern India and southern China: three metres eighty-four round the trunk, twenty-four metres tall. It is the bigger of the two in the city. The other grows inside the Orto Botanico, planted in 1888 and recorded as such. This one, out in San Marco north of the walls, has a girth a third larger and nothing behind it but a line in the national monumental tree register. No planting date, no owner, no article. That is the usual fate of a big tree on an ordinary street. The leaves carry camphor oils, which is where both names come from; the species is a close relative of the true camphor tree and the wood was used the same way. It is evergreen, so February looks much like July, and the leaves have a pale, almost blue-grey underside that flickers when the wind turns them over. It is a nine hundred metre walk from the botanical garden cluster, and it is outside the walls, which is the whole reason it is not better known.