Wat is de oudste boom van Sant'Alfio?
The oldest tree in Sant'Alfio is the Hundred-Horse Chestnut, the Castagno dei Cento Cavalli, a sweet chestnut on the eastern slope of Mount Etna at Via Castagno 100 Cavalli, about 30 kilometres north of Catania. A dendrological study by CREA in 2022 put it at roughly 2,200 years old, and both the Italian Wikipedia entry and the comune of Sant'Alfio's own page cite that figure. Older estimates drawn from folklore and earlier botanical work ran from 2,000 to 4,000 years. It is free to visit and open all year.
The 2,200 year figure comes from a dendrological study carried out by CREA, Italy's agricultural research council, in 2022. Both Wikipedia and the comune's own page repeat it, which is two citations of one study rather than two independent measurements, and worth knowing before treating the number as final. Older estimates, part folklore and part early botany, ranged from 2,000 to 4,000 years, and this page keeps that as the outer band rather than discarding it. Dating is complicated by what the tree has become. The original trunk split long ago into three stems growing from a single root system, measured at 10.5, 23 and 23.6 metres round, so there is no one trunk to work from and no intact core to read. A survey in 1780 ran a tape around the whole thing and came back with 57.9 metres, but that reading took in the branches. The register today records 22 metres of girth and 22 metres of height. Getting there means a car: it is about an hour from Taormina and half that from Catania, on mountain roads, and there is no useful bus.
Ken je een oudere boom in Sant'Alfio, of zie je hier een fout, laat het ons weten en we passen het aan.
Hier klopt iets nietNog een boom aandragen