La Pianta di Affori

Every Milanese from Affori knows this tree simply as la Pianta, the Plant, as if there were no other, and local legend insists Napoleon is the reason it stands where it does: supposedly planted to honour a Milanese noblewoman he had fallen for during his Italian campaign, sometime around 1800. Core samples taken in 2013, when a restoration crew drilled into the trunk to check its health, tell a more modest story: growth rings put the tree at about 187 years old at the time, closer to the 1820s than the Napoleonic Wars. This page gives both figures, since neither can be disproved outright and the drilled sample is the harder evidence. What is not in dispute is the tree itself, a plane 20 metres tall with a trunk over 2 metres in diameter, standing at the corner of Viale Affori and Via Astesani since before the surrounding neighbourhood existed as anything but farmland. An owl once nested in a cavity on its western side; the memory is marked today by a small wooden owl sculpture at the base of the trunk. A metal bracket further up the trunk, once used to string electrical cable through the branches, is a rare surviving trace of how Milan wired its outer suburbs before anyone thought to protect the tree carrying the load.