Il Platano di Viale Montesanto

A newspaper survey of Milan's monumental trees once put the city's ceiling at 34 metres. Italy's national register disagrees in several places, and this plane is one of them: 38 metres, growing at a street number rather than in a park. It stands outside Viale Montesanto 4 to 6, on the ring of boulevards that traces the line of Milan's sixteenth-century Spanish walls, on the stretch between Porta Garibaldi and the Giardini Montanelli. The register gives the trunk at 5.25 metres round. The city's celebrated plane, the Platano di Indro in the Giardini Montanelli, carries 8.36 metres and spent it going sideways into five limbs. This one had a pavement, a road and a row of facades, so it went up. Nobody has published an age for it. The national register carries girth and height and keeps no field for years, and no municipal file or local survey has filled the gap for this particular tree, so the tape measure is the only evidence there is. If you know when this stretch of the viale was planted, tell us and we will say so. There is no gate and no opening time. You walk the pavement to number 4 and look up until the crown closes over the road.