The Hackberry of Cortesano

Most hackberries with a trunk this thick are twice as tall. This one measures 410 centimetres around and stops at ten metres, an odd shape for Celtis australis, a species that normally runs to twenty-odd metres of straight grey trunk under a high rounded dome. Cortesano sits 570 metres up, nearly four hundred metres above the centre of Trento, and what grows well on that hillside is not what grows well down in the Adige valley. It stands on the Salita ai Spiazzi, the lane climbing through the hamlet, near the church of Sant'Antonio. It is one of the eighteen trees Trento formally recognised as monumental in 2024, when the comune finished its list and entered thirteen of them on the national register, and it is the only one of the eighteen this far out of town. Nobody has published an age for it. Italy's register carries girth, height and altitude and no age column at all, and the press coverage that named this tree named a place rather than a date, so the field is left blank instead of guessed at. Only one report puts it precisely, at the church, which is why the entry is flagged. Getting there is a bus rather than a walk: line 3 out of the centre, about twenty-five minutes up the hillside, then a short climb. What you get for it is a hamlet, a church, and a tree built like a barrel.