The Rovere of Vallone San Giuseppe
How do I find it? You can recognise it by the trunk, 3.33 metres round, running straight up and forking into two main limbs about seven metres above the ground. It stands among hazels on the steep left bank of the stream, just off Via Artemano.
The streets here are named after the dirt. Via Creta means clay, and clay is what was dug out of this valley to make bricks. It is also the ground this oak has spent its whole life in. It is a rovere, a sessile oak, 3.33 metres around the trunk according to Campania's regional card for it and 3.46 according to the national register, which is a thirteen-centimetre argument between two arms of the same state. It grew tall and straight rather than spreading, and about seven metres up the trunk divides into two main limbs. Around it stand hazels and a handful of other oaks on the steep left bank of a torrent that rises fifty metres higher, at the springs of Monte Vicalvano. That company is a remnant rather than a wood, which is part of why one oak on a stream bank ended up on a national register at all. The regional card calls it secolare, century-old, and offers no better number, so neither do we: over a hundred years, and nobody has said how much over. The most recent word on it is the 2008 regional survey the register was built from. Nothing suggests it has been lost, and it stands in a sheltered valley rather than on an exposed street. If you walk up from the station and find it there, we would like to hear.
- Species
- Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea)
- Girth
- 3.33 m
- Location
- Strada Comunale Artemano 6, loc. Vallone San Giuseppe, Piano di Sorrento (Vallone San Giuseppe, Piano di Sorrento)
- Access
- Free, public ground. The tree stands beside Strada Comunale/Via Artemano, an ordinary public residential road (confirmed via OpenStreetMap: highway=residential and highway=footway, no access= restriction tagged) that runs within about 20-30 metres of the tree's registered coordinate, on the edge of a small country lane above a stream valley. No gate, ticket or reception desk.
- Getting there
- Roughly 1.5 km, mostly uphill, from Piano di Sorrento's Circumvesuviana station; walkable in about 25-30 minutes or a short drive/taxi.
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Trees nearby
Discover more
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree