The Hundred-Horse Chestnut

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.