The Pine of Viale Aldo Moro

On the map it carries the shortest name available: Il Pino. The Pine, definite article, nothing after it. It is a stone pine on Viale Aldo Moro, 22 metres tall with a trunk 290 centimetres round, standing about five minutes on foot from the platforms at Matera Centrale. Most people who arrive here by train walk under it on their way to the Sassi without noticing that it is on the regional register of monumental trees. It earns that listing on shape as much as on size. Pinus pinea builds the umbrella crown you see along every Italian coast road, a wide flat canopy on a long bare trunk, and this one holds it over a busy urban avenue instead of a pine grove. In a city made almost entirely of pale limestone, where the oldest quarter is carved into the rock rather than planted on it, 22 metres of dark green counts as an event. A photographer recorded it for Wiki Loves Monuments in September 2018, crown full and intact, still throwing shade across the pavement. Nobody has dated it. There is no planting record, no core sample, and a stone pine puts on girth too unevenly across its life for anyone to work an honest age back from 290 centimetres. If you know when it went in, tell us.