Il Platano di Piazzale Libia

Milan's best known plane trees stop at 34 metres. This one is 35, and it is standing in the middle of a traffic square. Piazzale Libia lies about a kilometre out from Porta Romana in the south-east of the city, a junction broad enough to have kept room in the middle of it for a tree this size. Italy's national register of monumental trees lists the plane there at 35 metres on a trunk 4 metres round. That is taller than the register's own entry for the plane in front of the Basilica di Sant'Ambrogio and taller than the one in the Giardini Montanelli that a local survey named among the tallest plants in Milan. Street planes almost never get the chance. Across Italy they are cut back on a cycle to clear the wires and the balconies, and a plane that has been topped does not come back to a height like this. Whatever else was done to this tree, nobody took its crown out. Its age is not recorded anywhere. The national register measures girth and height and stops there, and no other document names this tree at all, so the years are simply missing. Anyone who knows when the square was planted can close that gap for us. Nothing to pay and nothing to open. Cross at the lights, stand under it, and work out how much of the sky it is holding up.