La Pianta di Manzoni

This plane carries a name nobody has explained. Affori calls it la Pianta di Manzoni, the Manzoni plant, and the label is older than any of the data attached to it: a local contributor mapped that name onto this exact spot in 2011, nine years before anyone tagged the same point with the national register's measurements. The name is not a government label. It is what somebody in the neighbourhood already knew. The obvious suspect is the villa. In the nineteenth century Villa Litta Modignani was Count Trivulzio's salon, and the intellectuals local histories name among its visitors include Alessandro Manzoni, who wrote I Promessi Sposi. Whether the novelist ever stood under this particular tree, or whether the name arrived some other way entirely, nobody has recorded. If you know the story, tell us. What is on paper is thinner than the name suggests. Italy's monumental-tree register lists the tree at 28 metres tall and records no girth for it at all. The 4.1 metres round quoted here comes from a plaque beside the tree, copied down by a passer-by rather than a surveyor, so read it as a reading rather than a survey. There is no age anywhere: this register carries no age field for any tree it holds. It is the third separately named plane in one small park, 65 metres from the fused Siamese pair and 150 from the taller two.