The Plane Tree of Via Maresca

The register lists this plane as a landmark rather than a specimen: it is how you know you have reached the second-to-last bend on the climb to the cemetery. A century of shade on a steep road earns a tree that job. Local testimony recorded by the Regione Campania puts the planting at around 1920, so roughly 105 years, and nobody holds a document proving it. What is measured rather than remembered: 2.95 metres round and ten metres tall, identical in the national register and the regional card, whose coordinates land within five metres of each other. You will not have to hunt for this one. A second plane stands beside it with a slimmer trunk, and the registered tree is the more imposing of the pair. At the last survey in 2020 its crown carried no dead stubs, which for a tree working a hot roadside on the Sorrentine peninsula is a better report than it sounds. Via Gennaro Maresca is a public street in Piano di Sorrento, the comune next door to Sorrento, not Sorrento itself: one Circumvesuviana stop from Sorrento station, then about twelve minutes on foot uphill. Keep going for a few more minutes and you reach the cemetery cypress, which makes the two of them one short climb rather than two errands.