The Plane of Viale Jonio

Rome's second-thickest registered plane does not grow in a villa garden. It stands on Viale Jonio in Montesacro, six kilometres north of the centre, on a road with traffic lights and a bus lane, and it measures five metres fifty-three around with thirty-two metres above it. Only the plane on Piazza San Cosimato in Trastevere beats it, and that one has the advantage of a famous square. Montesacro was farmland until the 1920s, when Rome laid out the Citta Giardino Aniene on the far side of the river Aniene: low houses, gardens, planted avenues, a whole quarter designed at once for people pushed out of the centre. The avenues came with trees. This is what one of them looks like after a century in which the houses around it were steadily replaced by apartment blocks and the tree was not. Two sources record it, the national monumental register through the Lazio list and a notice from the Comune di Roma itself. Neither gives an age. The suburb's own dates suggest a tree that went in with the streets, but no document says so, so it stays a suggestion. Metro B1 to Conca d'Oro leaves a short walk. It is a long way from anything else a visitor to Rome is doing that day, and it is a genuinely enormous tree.