The Plane Tree of the Autostazione

The oldest plane tree in Modena stands in a flowerbed in the middle of a coach station, and the last person to put a tape around it did so in 1986. The city's own 2015 census of thirty monumental trees gives it the title. The measurement, 4.25 metres of girth, comes from Valido Capodarca, who spent the 1980s surveying the region's notable trees and published eighty of them under a title that reads as a warning: Emilia-Romagna, ottanta alberi da salvare, eighty trees to save. The citizen registry that re-recorded the tree in October 2021 noted that the trunk has grown appreciably since and that nobody had taken a new figure. Nobody has dated it either, and we are not going to invent a number from the girth of a fast-growing species. If you know when it was planted, or you have five minutes and a tape measure, tell us and the page changes. Everything around it has been rebuilt into tarmac, kerbs and bus bays, and the tree kept its bed in the centre of the square. It is five minutes' walk from Modena's railway station, on open ground, free, and it is the easiest tree in this city to combine with a train.