The Hackberry of Via Fiume

Italians call this species spaccasassi, the rock splitter, because its roots get into stone and open it. They plant it in city streets anyway, because little else gives that much shade on that little water. This one has been on Via Fiume long enough to reach 445 centimetres round the trunk and 21 metres tall, a serious size for a hackberry and a very serious size for a tree growing out of a street in a hill town rather than a garden with soil to spare. Perugia's centre is built along a ridge with its streets cut into the slope, so a tree of this age here has spent its whole life finding water under paving. La Nazione named it alongside the city's two cedars of Lebanon in a survey of the monumental trees the comune maintains, and the same programme covers it: inspection, pruning, and the working assumption that it stays. Its age is not on record and no source estimates one. Mediterranean hackberry leafs out late, drops small dark fruit in autumn that the birds clear before most people notice it, and keeps smooth grey bark like a beech into old age, which is the quickest way to tell it from anything else on the street. It is a few minutes' walk from Piazza Italia.