Photo: Andrea Adelfio (CC BY)
The city dug up the pavement around this tree and threw it away.
Ancient Trees in the Giardino Pubblico
Muzio de Tommasini was a serious botanist who happened also to be the podesta of Trieste, and when the city bought land from Benedictine nuns in 1854 after a plan to build a church and housing there fell through, he laid out the garden and planted its avenue of planes himself.
Three hectares now hold roughly 320 large trees from five continents, arranged along paths lined with the bronze heads of Triestine writers, and Italo Svevo walked here often enough that the garden turns up in what he wrote. Nine of the garden's planes carry Italy's monumental designation, from the 542-centimetre giant whose root plate the city dug free of suffocating paving to a sibling seventeen centimetres short of its title. A pair of horse chestnuts, identical to the centimetre at 3.35 metres, stands with a valonia oak and a third chestnut whose own measurements two different registers cannot agree on. The garden is free and open daily.
All 11 stand in Trieste, which maps 36 remarkable trees in total.
Two horse chestnuts stand thirty metres apart in this garden and the register measured both at exactly 335 centimetres of girth and exactly twenty-three metres of height.
This is the only valonia oak in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and it is the only tree on Trieste's entire monumental register protected for botanical rarity and nothing else.
Seventeen centimetres of girth separate this plane from the garden's biggest.
Two of the thickest trees in Trieste stand about twenty metres apart in this garden, and this is the smaller by five centimetres.
This plane stands among the garden's horse chestnuts rather than with the heavyweights of its own kind.
On the regional register's figures, the tallest tree in the Giardino Pubblico is not its biggest.
The ground under this plane was meant for a church.
This plane is more than a metre slimmer than the garden's runner-up and two metres taller.
Nineteen metres from the garden's biggest plane stands this one, and it spends its life being compared.
Two registers measured this horse chestnut and they cannot both be right.
Opening times and visitor information: the City of Trieste.
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