The reason to come is one tree, and two more on the same slope are worth the trip. The Hundred-Horse Chestnut, on Etna above Sant'Alfio, is put at roughly 2,200 years by a 2022 study, its trunk long since split into three stems that measure 10.5, 23 and 23.6 metres round and grow from one root system. Five hundred metres further up the same path stands the Ship's Chestnut, itself estimated at around 1,800 years, and the forest at Magazzeni holds a birch found only on Etna. Italy made the Hundred-Horse a national monument in 1965. Free, open all year.
0 / 3 visitadas em Sant'Alfio
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The Hundred-Horse Chestnut
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · roughly 2,200 years · Sant'Alfio, eastern slope of Mount Etna
What looks like three enormous chestnuts on the slope above Sant'Alfio is one tree. The original trunk split long ago, and the three stems left standing, 10.5, 23 and 23.6 metres round, all grow from a single root system. A study by CREA, Italy's agricultural research council, put the whole thing at roughly 2,200 years old in 2022. Earlier estimates, part folklore and part botany, ran as high as 4,000.
The name comes from a story. A queen was caught in a storm on Etna with a hundred mounted knights, and the entire company is said to have sheltered under this one canopy. In 1780 someone arrived with a tape and reported 57.9 metres around, though that measurement took in the branches. The register today gives the trunk 22 metres and the tree 22 metres of height.
It has not had a quiet two millennia. Etna is directly above it, a fire took part of it in 1923, and it is still standing. Italy made it a national monument in 1965. In 1982 the State Forestry Corps worked through 22,000 trees and picked out 150 of exceptional value, this among them. UNESCO named it a Monument Messenger of Peace in 2006, and Italy voted it Tree of the Year in 2021.
Free, open all year, a few steps at the entrance.
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Foto: AusTitz (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Ship's Chestnut
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · roughly 1,800 years · Carpineto, Mascali, eastern slope of Mount Etna
One source dates this chestnut to roughly 1,800 years old; a second confirms only that it is over a thousand, without putting a number on it. Either way it has been growing on Etna's slope above Sant'Alfio for a very long time, five hundred metres up the same path from the tree everyone comes for.
It carries two names, and neither is entirely flattering. Castagno della Nave, the Ship's Chestnut, describes the base, which flares out at the ground like a hull. Locals also call it arusbigghiasonnu, roughly wakes-you-from-sleep, for the racket the hundreds of birds roosting in its crown make at dusk.
The tree stands on private land, but right at the edge of the path, and the source describing it calls it clearly visible without stepping onto the property. No fee, no gate to pass, and no need to leave the route up to the Hundred-Horse Chestnut.
Reached the same way as its more famous neighbour: about an hour by car from Taormina, then on foot the last five hundred metres. Like most old chestnuts on this slope, it still drops chestnuts every October.
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The Etna Birch of Magazzeni
Etna Birch (Betula aetnensis) · roughly 75 to 150 years, judged from a trunk 2.05 m round · Sant'Alfio, near Monti Sartorius
Nobody has dated this birch, and nobody should guess: its case for a place here rests on rarity rather than age. Betula aetnensis grows only on Mount Etna, a glacial relict left behind when the ice retreated, and it normally keeps to a band between 1,450 and 2,000 metres up the mountain. This one, registered in the forest at Magazzeni above Sant'Alfio, grows at just over 1,000.
Its bark runs unusually pale, almost white in patches, and that is not age showing, it is the ground: Etna's ash and lava carry too little lichen to darken a trunk the way rain and pollution would further down the slope.
Two separate registers, national and regional, agree on its size: 205 centimetres round and 12 metres tall.
It stands in open forest rather than behind any gate, a few kilometres from the two chestnuts that share this stretch of Etna's eastern slope, though no source describes a marked path leading to it specifically. Nobody has recorded when it was planted, or whether it planted itself. If you have stood in front of it and know either, tell us.
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