Il Platano del Giardino Bazlen

The garden is named after the two men who invented Adelphi, and the tree is the only thing in it older than the publishing house. Roberto Bazlen and Luciano Foa founded Adelphi Edizioni in Milan in 1962; the small green square off Corso di Porta Romana that carries their names is mostly a children's playground now, and this plane is the last big tree left standing in it. Its top was cut out at some point, which took metres off its height and left it stockier than it should be, but the trunk is still 1.95 metres thick, wide enough that the whole playground arranges itself around the base. The city is blunt about what happens next. Wood-decaying fungi have colonised the trunk and cannot be removed, so the tree is inspected at the collar and at every branch join, and the municipal page states plainly that it will be kept for as long as its presence does not create a safety problem over the play area beneath it. That is an unusually honest sentence to publish about a monument, and it is the reason to go now rather than eventually. Planes tolerate Milan's air better than almost anything else, which is how this one outlasted every other large tree on its own block.