Il Platano Siamese di Villa Litta

Two plane trees grew close enough together here that they stopped being two. Their roots fused, then part of their trunks, then their crowns interlaced, and the result is catalogued by the city as one tree, Platano VTA 9595, nicknamed the Siamese. It reaches 34 metres, and the reason the city protects it has less to do with size than with occupancy. Colonies of ring-necked parakeets and starlings nest in its cavities, crows keep a nest in the crown, and until a few years ago the large hollow on the north trunk held a Great Grey Owl, a bird whose natural range is the boreal forest of Lapland and Siberia. Woodpeckers drill the trunk for the insect larvae that come with rotting heartwood, and those holes are also the clearest sign of what is happening inside: the city writes that the tree is at the end of its biological cycle, its internal decay advanced, its stability worse than it was, the heavy steel cables binding the two trunks together recently replaced. It stands 300 metres from the Pianta of Affori, in a park the Litta family laid out in the second half of the 1700s, and a visit is worth making sooner rather than later.