Platano di Indro

The largest plane tree in Milan does not grow tall so much as it grows sideways, in every direction at once. Named for Indro Montanelli, the journalist the park was rededicated to in 2002, it stands about 50 metres from his statue with a trunk 8.36 metres around, the widest of any plane in the city, rising from a short, irregular, deeply fluted base that splits almost at ground level into at least five major limbs, each thick enough to be a trunk of its own. The effect, according to arborists who have surveyed it, is closer to a vase held open than to the single straight column most plane trees grow into. No planting record survives, ordinary for a park redesigned twice since 1784 and never catalogued tree by tree until recently, so its age can only be guessed at from girth: somewhere in its second century, possibly its third. What is documented is who lives in it. Ring-necked parakeets, an escaped-pet species now breeding wild across Milan, nest in cavities high in the crown, adding flashes of tropical green to a tree already too disorderly to look properly manicured. Visitors chasing the statue for a photograph rarely look up at what is standing over it.