La Paulownia di Via Madonnina

Milan's most photographed tree grows on a triangular scrap of land where a building once stood, until Allied bombs brought it down during the Second World War. Nothing was rebuilt on the corner of Via Madonnina and Via San Carpoforo, and sometime in the decades after the war a paulownia took root in the cleared gap, on land nobody had any particular plan for. By the 2010s the plot had become something else entirely: probably the most photographed tree in the city according to local press, its lilac flowers a fixture of every spring guide to the Brera district. That popularity is the only reason it still stands. A developer held rights to build a small residential block on the triangular lot, and only a sustained campaign by Brera residents, who formed a committee specifically to save the tree, persuaded Milan's city council to acquire the 155 square metre plot in 2016 in exchange for a larger site elsewhere in the city. The paulownia survived a violent storm in July 2023 that uprooted an old fig tree growing beside it. No scientific study has ever aged it precisely; residents describe it as over 65 years old, grown entirely on its own rather than planted by anyone with a plan.