The Great Plane of Parco Treves

Forty-eight metres. That is what put this plane on Italy's national register of monumental trees, not its age, which at roughly 155 years is fairly ordinary for the species. It stands in Parco Treves de' Bonfili, a small park built on Padua's 16th-century Venetian walls, and its trunk was measured at 6.37 metres round in 2022. The park is the reason it grew that way. Giuseppe Jappelli laid the ground out between 1829 and 1835 for the Treves de' Bonfili brothers as the first designed garden in Padua, part private botanical collection and part romantic landscape, planted for effect and for the long term by people who expected to be dead before it worked. Almost none of the built work survives: a neoclassical temple, the gardener's house and a small caryatid shrine, and that is the lot. The trees outlasted the architecture. The register rates this one's condition as adequate rather than good, which at 48 metres and nearly two centuries is not a surprise, and is worth knowing before you stand under it in a wind. Two more registered trees stand within 60 metres of it, a second plane and a leaning hackberry, which makes this the shortest worthwhile tree walk in the city: three protected trees, about ten minutes, no ticket.