Il Platano di Piazza Sant'Ambrogio

This plane tree joined Italy's national register of monumental trees in November 2025, which makes it one of the newest protected trees in the country and one of the taller ones in Milan. It stands 34 metres on a trunk 4.2 metres around, in the square in front of the Basilica di Sant'Ambrogio. Regione Lombardia announced it in a batch of 48 new entries that took the region's total to 476 recognised specimens. Its age has never been published. Italy's national register carries girth and height and no field for years, and no city document or newspaper survey has filled the gap, so the only honest handle is size. A London Plane of this girth in Milan is usually somewhere in its second century, and the range given here is exactly that: an estimate read off a tape measure, not a record. What it stands over is dated to the year. The basilica behind it was founded in 379 by Ambrose himself, and the low brick building with two unequal towers that you see today is the eleventh and twelfth-century replacement. Against that clock the tree is a newcomer. Against any other it is old. It is also the tree most often photographed by accident in this city, sitting in the background of everybody's picture of the church, while being the reason the square has any shade at all.