Il Platano dei 34 Metri ai Giardini Montanelli

Depending on which document you trust, this is either one of the two tallest trees in Milan or simply one of the taller ones. Il Giorno's survey of the city's monumental trees calls 34 metres the greatest height reached by any plant in Milan and names two plane trees that get there, one at Villa Litta and this one, off via Palestro. Italy's national register separately lists a Villa Litta plane at 43 metres. The title is contested, and that is worth saying rather than picking a side. The measurement of this tree is not contested: 475 centimetres around the trunk, 34 metres tall. Its age is blank. The national register has no field for years and no newspaper or municipal file has dated it, so girth and height are the only honest numbers here. It is also not the famous tree in these gardens. That is the plane with the 8.36-metre trunk, dated to 239 years, which grew outwards into five limbs instead of upwards. This one did the opposite. It has a second registered plane nearby at 32 metres, plus a bald cypress, a Mediterranean hackberry and a Caucasian wingnut: six register-listed monumental trees inside one set of railings, in a park first laid out in 1784. Nobody stops for this one, because in company like that, being the tallest is not conspicuous. Look up rather than at the trunk.