The Hackberry of the Parco degli Scipioni

Two official surveys measured this hackberry and agreed on its waist to within a centimetre: four metres around. They do not agree on its height. Italy's national monumental tree register records 20 metres. The Appia Antica park authority, in its own catalogue of notable trees, says 15. Both figures are current, neither has been withdrawn, and there is no way from here to tell which tape was right, so take the tree as somewhere between the two. It is about a hundred years old, which makes it younger than nearly everything around it. The Parco degli Scipioni is laid out over the tomb of the Scipios, burial vault of the family that produced the general who beat Hannibal, with the columbarium of Pomponius Hylas a few steps away and the Aurelian Walls along the edge. The park in its present form is the work of Raffaele de Vico, who designed it around 1929, and this hackberry went in as part of that design: a piece of 20th century landscaping now the largest living thing in a park built on third century BC ground. The park authority calls it one of its most important specimens, for its size, its bearing and the balance of its crown, and rates its health as good. A second hackberry, slightly stouter, stands about a hundred metres off against the Aurelian wall itself. It is on the register too. So far nobody else has written it down.