The Date Palm of Borgo La Martella
age unknownDate Palm
Borgo La Martella was built to be a beginning. In the early 1950s architect Ludovico Quaroni and colleagues, funded through Adriano Olivetti's postwar housing programme, laid out this village from nothing to rehouse families moved out of Matera's cave-dwelling Sassi district, a case still studied in Italian planning history. Somewhere along its residential streets, on Via Monte Bianco, a date palm has been growing since before anyone thought to measure it: 204 centimetres round and seven metres tall at its most recent survey. Date palms do not read their own age the way most of this project's trees do. Phoenix dactylifera is a monocot, its trunk thickens unevenly and lays down none of the annual rings a dendrologist would need to work an age backward from girth, so no age is given here and none is guessed. The tree is registered as accessible, standing on an ordinary numbered street rather than behind any farm gate, one of the few trees in Matera's monumental register nobody has needed to fence off from visitors. If you have walked past it and can say more, tell us.
The button above opens directions in your maps app. About 5.7 km / roughly a 10-15 minute drive west of central Matera. No public transport route to Via Monte Bianco confirmed this pass; Borgo La Martella is a distinct village-neighbourhood of the comune, not the historic centre.
- Species
- Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera)
- Age estimate
- Location
- Via Monte Bianco, Borgo La Martella, Matera (La Martella, a planned village about 5.7 km west of central Matera, built 1951-54 to rehouse families from the Sassi)
- Access
- Not independently confirmed beyond the register, but the evidence points to an ordinary public residential street: the register itself flags this tree 'Accessibile', it sits on Via Monte Bianco in Borgo La Martella, a numbered residential street rather than a private estate or farm name, and OpenStreetMap shows no building or private-land polygon over the coordinate. Unlike this comune's masseria and jazzo entries, nothing here names a private working farm.
- Getting there
- About 5.7 km / roughly a 10-15 minute drive west of central Matera. No public transport route to Via Monte Bianco confirmed this pass; Borgo La Martella is a distinct village-neighbourhood of the comune, not the historic centre.
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