Trieste holds Italy's densest cluster of registered monumental trees, 48 by the city's own count. Twelve stand within three hundred metres of each other in the park an archduke planted on a limestone headland, testing conifers from California. Twelve more, mostly London planes, grow in a public garden a botanist mayor planted in 1854. Four, two bagolari and two elms, stand across the old city and San Giusto. The rest stand alone or in pairs: pines, a sinkhole oak, a chestnut at Opicina, a maple and lime at Basovizza, a university oak, a plane on the road to Miramare.
0 of 36 visited in Trieste
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · 170 years · Grignano
The man who planted this tree was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began the Miramare park in the spring of 1856 on a limestone headland with almost no soil on it, and he treated the whole thing as an experiment: he wanted to find out which foreign species would hold on to bare Adriatic rock. Soil was carted in. Within ten years the garden had cedars from Lebanon, North Africa and the Himalaya, firs from Spain, cypresses from California and Mexico, and this coast redwood from the fog belt of northern California. Maximilian kept ordering plants for it after he sailed for Mexico to be crowned emperor, and he never came back. The redwood took. It is now 4.25 metres round the trunk and thirty metres tall, the largest of the two redwoods here and one of twelve protected trees standing within three hundred metres of each other. Put a hand on it. The bark is soft, dry and fibrous rather than hard, and on old trees it goes thirty centimetres deep, which is what lets a redwood walk out of a fire that kills everything around it. This one is a child by the standards of its species, which passes 115 metres at home.
Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) · 170 years · Grignano
In the wild this species survives in two groves on the California coast, together covering less than a square kilometre, and it is listed as threatened. Planted anywhere else with sea air, it grows into one of the fastest and heaviest conifers a garden can hold. That is the paradox of the Monterey cypress, and this is what it looks like when it goes well: 4.1 metres round the trunk, eighteen metres tall, and far wider than it is high, because an old Monterey cypress stops climbing and starts spreading until the crown flattens out like a table. Maximilian's gardeners put it in after 1856 among the cypresses ordered from California and Mexico, and on a headland that gets the bora full in the face it has done the thing the archduke was testing for. The wind has pushed the whole crown away from the sea, so the tree leans its weight inland and reads as a permanent record of the direction the worst weather comes from. Crush a leaf between your fingers and it smells of lemon. The Italian sources describing the park call this simply the cypress, and one of them names the wrong species for it, so trust the trunk rather than the label.
Ghost Pine (Pinus sabiniana) · 170 years · Grignano
Trieste calls this one il pino fantasma, the ghost pine, and the name is a description rather than a flourish. Its needles are long, grey and set so thinly on the branch that you can see straight through the crown to the sky behind it, which no other pine in the park lets you do. Stand under it on a bright day and the tree casts almost no shadow. It comes from the dry foothills that ring California's Central Valley, where it grows on serpentine and rubble that defeats everything else, and it was one of the more eccentric things Maximilian's gardeners were given to try. Italy's register protects it on grounds of botanical rarity, a category only two trees in the whole Trieste list are given. The cones are the other reason to come. A ghost pine cone is the size of a human head, weighs up to a kilogram, and hangs on hooked scales that will draw blood if you grab one wrongly; the people who lived in its native range ate the seeds, which are large and oily and worth the trouble. At 2.5 metres round and twenty metres tall it is not the biggest tree here, and it is the strangest.
Greek Strawberry Tree (Arbutus andrachne) · 170 years · Grignano
This is a shrub that forgot to stop. Arbutus andrachne normally tops out as a thick bush on a Greek or Turkish hillside, and the Italian register lists this one at 2.04 metres round the trunk and twelve metres tall, which for the species is close to absurd. It is the reason the tree is protected on botanical rarity as well as on size. The bark is the thing to look at. Each summer the outer layer peels away in thin sheets like sunburn, and what is left underneath is a bare trunk the colour of cinnamon, cool and slightly waxy to touch, with no fissures anywhere on it. Run a hand along it and the surface feels closer to skin than to timber. Maximilian's gardeners planted it after 1856 among the Mediterranean species that were meant to prove the headland could hold a garden, and unlike the common strawberry tree it was never a safe bet this far north. Fifty-nine of its common cousins, Arbutus unedo, grow a couple of hundred metres away as a registered stand, and none of them has done what this one did. Its flowers come as small white bells in spring, its fruit as round orange berries.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 180 years · Barriera Vecchia
The city dug up the pavement around this tree and threw it away. The Giardino Pubblico's biggest plane is 542 centimetres round the trunk and thirty-four metres tall, the largest tree in Trieste by measurement, and the paving laid over its root plate was slowly suffocating it, so the municipality broke the surface out and replaced it with draining material. That is what caring for a 180 year old tree in a city actually looks like. The garden around it was begun in 1854 by Muzio de Tommasini, a serious botanist who happened also to be the podesta of Trieste, on ground bought from Benedictine nuns after a plan to build a church and housing there was dropped. He planted the planes himself. Three hectares now hold roughly 320 large trees from five continents, arranged along paths lined with the bronze heads of Triestine writers, and Italo Svevo walked here often enough that the garden turns up in what he wrote. Nine planes in this garden are on Italy's monumental register and this is the heaviest of them. Stand back far enough to take in the whole trunk: the bark flakes off in plates and leaves the pale patchwork that is the only thing about a London plane you can identify from a hundred metres.
Photo: Andrea Adelfio (CC BY)
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 170 years · Barriera Vecchia
Two horse chestnuts stand thirty metres apart in this garden and the register measured both at exactly 335 centimetres of girth and exactly twenty-three metres of height. Identical to the centimetre, listed as two separate protected trees, and there is no way to tell from the paper which is which. They were almost certainly planted together when Muzio de Tommasini laid the garden out from 1854, and they have grown at the same rate for 170 years because nothing has happened to one that did not happen to the other. A third, slightly smaller at 317 centimetres, stands further north. Come in May. The horse chestnut is one of the few big trees that flowers in a way you notice from the other end of a park, holding hundreds of white candles upright on the ends of the branches, each one flecked with yellow that turns pink once the flower has been visited and no longer wants bees. The species itself is not from anywhere near here. It was unknown to western Europe until the sixteenth century and comes from a handful of mountain valleys in Albania and Greece, where it is now endangered in the wild.
Valonia Oak (Quercus ithaburensis subsp. macrolepis) · 170 years · Barriera Vecchia
This is the only valonia oak in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and it is the only tree on Trieste's entire monumental register protected for botanical rarity and nothing else. Every other entry earns its place on size, age or the look of the thing. This one is here because there is no second example within a region of 1.2 million people. At 179 centimetres round it is also one of the smallest trees on the list, which tells you how little the measurement matters in this case. The acorns are the reason the species was ever worth anything. A valonia acorn sits in a cup covered in thick shaggy scales that curl outward like a sea anemone, and those cups are extraordinarily rich in tannin. For centuries the eastern Mediterranean shipped them west by the boatload to tan leather, and the trade was large enough that the Greek and Turkish groves were managed for it. The species is semi-evergreen, holding tired leaves through mild winters and dropping them late. It grows wild in Greece, western Turkey and one wood in Puglia. Muzio de Tommasini, a botanist before he was a mayor, would have known exactly how unusual it was to put one in the ground here.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 200 years · Boschetto del Ferdinandeo
Trieste's oldest tree stands on a traffic roundabout. The municipality's survey of its 48 monumental trees puts this London plane above 200 years, which makes it older than every park in the city: older than the Giardino Pubblico begun in 1854 a kilometre downhill, older than the Miramare park begun in 1856, older than the Ferdinandeo villa on the slope above it. It was in the ground when Trieste was still Austria's only real seaport and the road it stands on was a country lane. It is five metres and ten centimetres round the trunk and twenty-five metres tall. The London plane was the tree of choice for the avenues and gardens Trieste built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which is why nearly a fifth of the city's protected trees are planes, and this is the survivor from the first of those plantings. A second registered plane stands twenty-five metres away, 440 centimetres round, and the two of them frame the entrance to the Boschetto del Ferdinandeo, the wooded hill that Triestini have walked up on Sunday afternoons for as long as the trees have been there. Take Via Giulia out of the public garden and keep climbing.
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · 180 years · Citta Vecchia
For over 180 years this hackberry has stood in what is now Piazza Hortis, and for most of that time nobody thought about what people were doing to its roots. In 2025 the city fenced it off: pedestrians had been crossing the square for generations without knowing they were walking on top of nearly two centuries of root plate, compacting the soil the tree breathes through. The comune spent about 17,000 euros on the fence and on new drainage-friendly planting around the base, part of a wider programme that has already stripped suffocating pavement away from monumental trees elsewhere in the city.
Trieste has identified 48 monumental trees within its borders, the highest concentration the comune has recorded of any Italian city, and this bagolaro is one of them. In September 2024 it was fitted with a TreeTag, a small ID marker placed as part of a European citizen-science campaign that measures a tree's condition and records the data for researchers to track over time.
Celtis australis is native across the Mediterranean and famously slow to give up: its wood was used for cart axles and ploughshares because it resists splitting even when green. This one has outlived the square's own name twice over, and the piazza, library and street around it are all named for Attilio Hortis, the Trieste historian and librarian who died a century ago.
Siberian Elm (Ulmus pumila) · San Vito
The garden at Piazzale Rosmini climbs the San Vito hill above the church of Madonna del Mare, nine and a half thousand square metres of slope and lawn that the city's own parks department singles out for two things: its valuable trees and its play areas for children of different ages. The Siberian elm growing there, 3.58 metres round and 24 metres tall, is one of Trieste's registered monumental specimens and the garden's standout tree.
Ulmus pumila earned its place in European gardens for the same reason it earns a mention here: it shrugs off Dutch elm disease far better than the native field and wych elms the fungus devastated across the continent from the 1970s onward. A healthy elm of real size in a European city is worth noticing partly for that reason alone, a survivor by constitution rather than by luck.
Like the bagolaro at Piazza Hortis, this elm was fitted with a TreeTag in September 2024, part of the same citywide EU citizen-science campaign that is slowly building a public record of condition and growth for Trieste's 48 monumental trees. No individual age has been published for it, so none is claimed here.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · Villa Revoltella
The park came with a condition attached to it. Pasquale Revoltella left his grounds above Via Fabio Severo to the city of Trieste on the terms that they stay free and stay open, and five hectares of hillside are still a municipal garden that charges nobody anything and unlocks its gates at seven in the morning. A national parks and gardens competition later voted it the most beautiful park in Italy.
Two Aleppo pines inside it hold Italy's monumental-tree protection, standing about fifty metres apart. This is the thicker of the pair and the shorter, 360 centimetres round the trunk and eighteen metres tall, where its neighbour is slimmer and carries four metres more height. Pinus halepensis is the pine of the dry Mediterranean, the species that takes bare limestone where nothing else will hold on, and the karst Trieste sits on is exactly that ground. Its cones are small, hard and slow, sitting closed on the branch for years at a time.
Nobody has put a number of years on either tree. The regional register measured this one in 2025 and left the age column empty, Il Piccolo photographed a monumental Aleppo pine here in 2018 without dating it, and girth on its own will not settle the question for this species in this climate. If you know of a figure with a real basis behind it, tell us.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · Villa Revoltella
Trieste keeps a plan for the day its biggest trees come down. Seventy-eight of them were surveyed one at a time for the risk of failure, and this pine is on that list, entered as a trunk 110 centimetres across in the park at Villa Revoltella. Convert it and you get 346 centimetres round, which is what the regional register measured here, and fourteen centimetres less than the other protected Aleppo pine standing fifty metres away. Two pines, two sets of figures. That arithmetic is the only thing proving this hillside holds a pair rather than one tree counted twice.
This is the taller of them by four metres, twenty-two to the top, and the slimmer. Pinus halepensis does not grow to order: it leans, forks low and carries its needles in loose tufts at the ends of long bare limbs, so an old one reads as an open, see-through tree rather than a column, and a slope exaggerates the habit further. The register protected it on size and on the character of the stand it belongs to.
What the register gave no answer to is how old it is, and neither does anything else published about this park. A dated planting record for the Revoltella grounds would settle both pines at once, and somebody in Trieste may well have one.
Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia) · Citta Vecchia
Italy's monumental-tree register holds this elm twice. One sheet calls it the tree of Villa Sartorio on Via dei Modiano and gives 353 centimetres of girth and 23 metres of height; another calls it the tree of the Giardino Sartorio and gives 350 and 20. The two records sit forty-three metres apart, which is the width of a garden rather than the distance between two trees, and every independent account of the place, the newspaper's, the museum's and the city's, describes exactly one Caucasian elm here. One tree, two files. It is also why the pin on this page is marked approximate: nobody can say which of the two readings lands closer to the trunk.
The Comune di Trieste owns only four monumental trees outright, and this is one of them. In 2026 all four went into a municipal programme of roughly 135,000 euros for survey and selective pruning, this elm alongside the two great planes of the Giardino Pubblico.
Zelkova carpinifolia comes from the Caucasus and the Caspian forests of northern Iran and reached European gardens in the eighteenth century. It is not a true elm, whatever the name says. Its leaves are small and evenly toothed, nearer a hornbeam's than an elm's, which is exactly what carpinifolia means. Nobody has published an age for it, so we offer none; if you know when it went into this garden, tell us.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · Opicina
Trieste's protected trees stand in designed grounds: a Habsburg's experimental headland, the public garden a botanist mayor laid out, the wooded hill above it. This one stands on a state road. The horse chestnut at Via Nazionale 51 grows up on the karst plateau at Opicina, a tram ride out of Piazza Oberdan, with the SR58 running past it and a footway in between.
It is 324 centimetres round and fifteen metres tall, and the honest thing to say next is that we know nothing else about it. Neither of Il Piccolo's surveys of the city's old trees mentions an Opicina chestnut. No age has ever been published. The only document that names it is the protection order itself, issued nationally and republished by the region, which is one source wearing two covers rather than two sources. The frontage is public and has a pavement along it; whether the trunk itself sits just inside a gate at number 51 is the one thing we could not settle from here.
Come in May. A horse chestnut in flower holds hundreds of white spikes upright at once and reads as a flowering tree from the far end of the street. By August most European ones are going brown, from a leaf-mining moth that crossed the continent in the 1990s, and the walk is worth less. If anybody up there knows this tree's age, or owns a tape measure, we would like to hear it.
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · 145 years · Grignano
Two official surveys disagree about how many trunks this tree has. The regional decree's sheet records three stems, of 267, 230 and 250 centimetres round. An independent field measurement made in October 2021 for Italy's citizen tree register found a single trunk of 5.20 metres and noted specifically that it is not multi-stemmed. Nobody has been back to settle it, and the height is unsettled too, at 25 metres by one reading and 28 by the other.
What is not in doubt is what it is doing here. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began this garden in 1856 on a limestone headland with almost no soil on it, had earth carted in, and filled it with conifers from California, Mexico, the Himalaya and Lebanon. The holm oak is the other kind of tree at Miramare: an evergreen broadleaf of the Mediterranean coast, small dark leaves held hard through the winter, no season in which it drops them. It is one of twelve protected trees standing within three hundred metres of each other.
Its age is given as about 145 years, calculated from a registered planting year rather than from the wood, so take a decade either side. Maximilian sailed for Mexico to be crowned emperor and was shot by a firing squad in 1867. The park went on being planted without him, and this oak is part of what came after.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · 130 years · Grignano
Six Aleppo pines in this park carry the same protection, all within three hundred metres of each other, and this is not the largest of them. The biggest measures 3.68 metres round the trunk; this one is 3.10. It is here because it is the only one of the six that anybody has put a date to: about 130 years, calculated by Italy's citizen tree register from a recorded planting year rather than from the wood, so read it as a decade either way.
That would make it a good forty years younger than the garden it stands in. Archduke Maximilian began Miramare in 1856 by carting soil onto bare limestone to find out which foreign species would hold on to Adriatic rock. The Aleppo pine needed no such help. It is the pine of the Mediterranean shoreline, at home on thin stony ground and salt air, with an open crown that lets the light through and cones that can stay shut on the branch for years, waiting for heat to open them.
It is 19 metres tall, and here is the honest part: at this coordinate you will find several trunks of much the same thickness, none of them separately named or described in any register we could find. Nobody has photographed this one closely enough to tell it from its neighbours. If you work out which is which, tell us.
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · 112 years · San Giusto
Hundreds of schoolchildren carried this tree up the hill. On Sunday 29 March 1914 a procession from the Ginnastica Triestina gymnastic society walked a young hackberry to the top of the San Giusto hill and planted it in the square in front of the cathedral, watched by the vice-mayor, the engineer Costantino Doria. The poet Riccardo Pitteri wrote a piece for the day, Per l'albero di San Giusto. Trieste was then the Austro-Hungarian empire's great seaport. Four months later the empire was at war.
The citizen register that measured it says it replaced a tree felled in 1906 after storm damage, which no other source we found repeats, so treat that as one register's note rather than settled history. What is measured is the trunk: 3.77 metres round on 28 December 2023, with the same survey rating its health as fair rather than good and recording two large branches cut away. That is a reasonable state for a tree standing alone on an open hilltop in a city known for its wind.
Celtis australis is what Italian towns plant where nothing else will hold, a species that takes drought, poor soil and limestone without complaint. This one has the best address in Trieste, on the square between the cathedral of San Giusto and the castle, with the whole gulf below it. It carries no national monument code. That is a gap in the paperwork rather than in the tree.
Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) · Percedol, Carso
Trieste used to go skating here. The pond at the bottom of the Percedol dolina, a sinkhole in the limestone of the plateau above the city, lies deep enough in its own shade to hold ice through the winter, and in the 1800s and early 1900s that made it the city's rink. Turkey oaks ring the hollow. This is the one the state wrote down.
Thirty-five metres is a great deal of Quercus cerris. Three separate readings exist, from the national monumental register, the regional decree and an independent field visit in October 2021, and all three came back with the same two numbers: 3.10 metres round the trunk, 35 metres tall. That degree of agreement is rare in this work, and it describes a tall, straight tree rather than a broad one.
Nobody has dated it. Neither register carries an age for this oak, and no growth-rate estimate has been made from the girth, so the honest answer is that we do not know. If you know of a survey that dates the oaks of Percedol, tell us.
The setting carries the walk on its own. A dolina is a hollow where limestone has dissolved away beneath, and this is one of the best known on the Trieste Carso, with a marked path around its rim, a protected pond at the bottom and, in the shade below, what local sources call the finest Turkey oaks on the plateau.
Montpellier Maple (Acer monspessulanum) · 205 years · Basovizza
This maple was already well over a century old in May 1945, when the shaft it stands beside was used to kill people. The Foiba di Basovizza is a disused mine pit on the karst above Trieste. In the weeks after the German surrender, occupying Yugoslav troops threw Italian civilians and soldiers into it. Italy declared the site a national monument in 1992, and it is the principal place of mourning for those families and for the Triestines deported to camps in Yugoslavia in the same period. Entry is free and the grounds are open at any hour.
The tree is an Acer monspessulanum, the small three-lobed maple of dry Mediterranean limestone, a species that seldom grows large. This one has reached 13 metres, and its trunk measures either 2.56 metres round or 2.35, depending on which survey you read: the national register recorded the larger figure, an independent field visit in October 2021 the smaller. Its age is given as about 205 years, calculated from a registered birth year rather than from the wood, so read it as two decades either way.
People come to Basovizza for the monument and not for a tree, and that is the right order. The maple is older than any of it, older than the memorial and older than what the memorial records. The documentation centre beside it keeps seasonal hours. The grounds, and the maple, do not close.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · Basovizza
The inn beside it is named after it, in two languages. Trattoria Al Tiglio, Pri Lipi, which is Italian and Slovene for the same thing: at the lime tree. Basovizza is a Carso village above Trieste that has spoken both for a long time, and the building was a post station on the road from Trieste to Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century, where travellers changed horses.
How old the lime is, nobody has written down. The parish newsletter calls it secolare, centuries-old, which is the word a village uses about a tree it has always had, and no survey has done better than that. The measurements are no tidier. The national monumental register lists it at 2.41 metres round and 11 metres tall; a field visit in August 2024 put the girth at about 3.30 metres. That gap is too wide to be carelessness with a tape, and the likeliest explanation is the trunk itself, which the same 2024 survey describes as sound but unusually shaped. Somebody put the tape somewhere else.
The good news from that visit is the health rating: good, as of August 2024. It is a small-leaved lime, which means that for a fortnight around midsummer the tree announces itself before you have seen it, and the tables underneath are the obvious place to be while it does.
If you have measured this trunk, tell us where you put the tape.
Downy Oak (Quercus pubescens) · 100-150 years · San Giovanni
Of the forty-eight trees Trieste protects as monumental, one belongs to a university. Il Piccolo's survey of the list noted it in a single line, that the University of Trieste also owns a century-old oak, and that is still more or less all anybody has written about it. The tree is a downy oak, the native oak of the karst plateau that rises behind the city, and it stands in the grounds of the engineering campus off Via Licio Giorgieri in San Giovanni, on university land rather than in a public park.
It is bigger than the setting suggests. Italy's citizen tree register sent someone with a tape in October 2021, who measured the trunk at 3.15 metres round and the crown at fifteen metres tall, at exactly the point where the national and regional registers place it. For a species that usually grows as a scrubby, twisted tree on thin limestone soil, that is a serious girth.
How old it is, nobody has pinned down. "Secolare" is the only word on record, meaning over a century, and it is kept that loose here because the source keeps it that loose. If you know when it was planted, or what stood on this hillside before the campus, tell us.
This is working university ground, not a park: the campus streets are open and unfenced, so walk in, and treat it as the university's tree rather than a city garden's.
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · 170 years · Grignano
Miramare has two protected coast redwoods, and this is the one that loses the argument. It measures 4.01 metres round and twenty-seven metres tall; its neighbour sixty-odd metres to the northeast, the park's headline redwood, is 4.25 metres round and thirty metres tall. Both were measured again in October 2021 by Italy's citizen tree register, which found this trunk at exactly the figure the national register gives.
They are here because of one experiment. When Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began the park in the spring of 1856 on a bare limestone headland, he wanted to see which foreign trees would take to the Adriatic, and within its first decade the planting included conifers from the fog belt of northern California. Nobody dated this trunk individually, so its age of roughly 170 years is an inference from that campaign rather than a measurement, and it may be a little younger.
What it has outlived is the man. Maximilian left Miramare to become Emperor of Mexico and was shot there in 1867, while redwoods that can live for two thousand years were barely taller than the castle's gardeners.
Stand between the two redwoods and compare the bark: soft, fibrous and red-brown on both, but this is the slimmer trunk and the lower crown.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · 130 years · Grignano
The biggest of Miramare's six protected Aleppo pines is also the one nobody has put a date on. It measures 3.68 metres round the trunk and twenty-five metres tall, figures the national register gives and Italy's citizen tree register confirmed with its own tape in October 2021. The only pine of the six with a recorded age is a smaller one, 3.10 metres round, which that citizen register calculated at about 130 years. So the largest pine in the grove is dated here by its sibling and by the park itself: planted some time after the spring of 1856, when Archduke Maximilian began laying out Miramare on a bare limestone point, which puts it somewhere between about 115 and 170 years.
Aleppo pine is the Mediterranean's own survival specialist, named after the Syrian city and built for heat, salt wind and almost no soil, which is roughly what Maximilian's gardeners had to offer before they carted earth onto the rock. It has done well on it. The six stand within a few hundred metres of each other and a stranger would struggle to rank them by eye.
This one sits about fifteen metres from the second largest, and between them they make the grove's heaviest pair. Look for the thickest trunk and the tallest crown in that corner of the park.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · 130 years · Grignano
Fifteen metres from the largest Aleppo pine at Miramare stands the second largest, and the gap between them is 34 centimetres of girth and five metres of height. This one measures 3.34 metres round and twenty metres tall. Those are the national register's figures, and Italy's citizen tree register found the same trunk at the same point in October 2021, which is as close to certainty as a measurement of a living tree gets.
It belongs to a protected group of six pines in the park, and the group is the point. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg started Miramare in 1856 as a test of what would grow on a bare limestone promontory above the Adriatic, and a pine built for drought, salt wind and thin soil was the obvious answer to the question he was asking. None of the six is dated individually except a smaller sibling put at about 130 years, so this one is placed somewhere between roughly 115 and 170 years by that sibling and by the park's own start date. Maximilian never saw it grown: he left for Mexico and was shot there in 1867.
If you want to stand between the two heaviest pines in the grove, this is the western half of the pair.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · 130 years · Grignano
This pine is thicker than three of its protected neighbours and lower than all but one of them. The trunk measures 3.24 metres round; the crown stops at sixteen metres, where a slimmer pine in the same grove reaches twenty-five. The national register gives both figures and Italy's citizen tree register checked them on the ground in October 2021 and found the same numbers at the same point. Neither register says why it grew wide rather than tall, and it is not our place to guess.
It is one of six Aleppo pines at Miramare protected together, all within a few hundred metres, all planted into the park that Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began carving out of a bare limestone headland in 1856. Soil had to be brought in before anything could grow here. Aleppo pine, named after the Syrian city and native to the dry Mediterranean coast, was one of the trees that needed the least of it. No record dates this trunk; by its dated sibling, about 130 years old, and the park's own start, it falls somewhere between about 115 and 170 years.
It stands at the northern end of the grove with the smallest of the six a few paces away, which makes it the easier of that pair to pick out: the thicker one.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · 130 years · Grignano
The slimmest of Miramare's five big Aleppo pines is as tall as the fattest. It measures 3.05 metres round the trunk and twenty-five metres to the top, the same height as the grove's heaviest pine, which carries more than sixty centimetres of extra girth to get there. The national register holds those figures and Italy's citizen tree register confirmed them in person in October 2021.
It also stands a little apart. Four of the other protected pines stand in two close pairs; this one is about ninety metres southeast of the largest, on its own. All six are protected as a group, part of the planting Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg started in 1856 when he set out to make a garden on a promontory of bare Karst limestone with the sea on three sides. Aleppo pine was a natural choice: a tree of the dry Mediterranean coast that asks for very little soil and tolerates salt. Its age is not recorded; by the one dated pine in the grove, about 130 years, and the park's start date, it lies somewhere between about 115 and 170 years.
It has watched the park turn from a Habsburg's private experiment into a free public garden where only the castle charges for entry.
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · 130 years · Grignano
The smallest tree in Miramare's protected pine grove is barely a third of the height of the park's redwoods. It measures 2.13 metres round the trunk and ten metres tall, well below its five siblings, which run from 3.05 to 3.68 metres round and up to twenty-five metres high. The national register gives those figures and Italy's citizen tree register confirmed them at the same spot in October 2021.
It is protected because the grove is. The six Aleppo pines at Miramare are listed as one designated group, and a group listing takes the modest members with the grand ones, which is how a ten-metre pine ends up on the same national register as the largest plane in Trieste. That is not a mistake. A grove planted together reads as a grove, and this is the tree that shows how much the others have grown.
When it went in is unknown. The park itself dates from 1856, when Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began turning a bare limestone point into a garden, and the grove's one dated pine is put at about 130 years; a smaller trunk does not have to mean a younger tree, so this one gets the same broad span, somewhere between about 115 and 170 years. If you know its history, tell us.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
Seventeen centimetres of girth separate this plane from the garden's biggest. It measures 5.25 metres round the trunk and thirty-one metres tall; the garden's great plane, about fifty-five metres to the east, is 5.42 metres and thirty-four. That makes this the runner-up in the Giardino Pubblico and, on the national register's numbers, one of the thickest trees in the city. Italy's citizen tree register measured it again in October 2021 and found the register's figure exactly.
The garden was begun in 1854 by Muzio de Tommasini, a botanist who was also the city's podesta, on ground bought from Benedictine nuns, and the city's own parks service records that he planted its avenue of planes himself. Nobody has dated this trunk on its own, but a plane of this size in this garden is the obvious candidate for his planting, which would make it somewhere around 160 to 180 years old. Since then the garden has filled with roughly 320 big trees and the bronze heads of Triestine writers, and Italo Svevo walked its paths often enough to write it into his books.
Second place in a city of old trees is a long way from ordinary. Nine planes in this garden carry national protection, and this one comes within a hand's width of the largest.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
Two of the thickest trees in Trieste stand about twenty metres apart in this garden, and this is the smaller by five centimetres. It measures 5.20 metres round the trunk and twenty-eight metres tall. Its neighbour to the northeast is 5.25 metres; the great plane beyond both is 5.42. At that size five centimetres is a rounding error, and Italy's citizen tree register, which checked both in October 2021, found the national register's numbers held for each.
The man responsible was an unusual kind of mayor. Muzio de Tommasini ran Trieste as its podesta and spent the rest of his time as a working botanist, and when the city opened this public garden in 1854 on land bought from Benedictine nuns, he planted its plane avenue himself, according to the municipality's own account. No record dates this particular tree, but a trunk this size in that avenue is most likely one of his, which would put it at roughly 160 to 180 years.
Those years have covered the whole modern history of the city: a Habsburg free port, the First World War, a change of flag after 1918 and another fight over its border after 1945. The plane has simply got wider through all of it, one annual ring at a time.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
This plane stands among the garden's horse chestnuts rather than with the heavyweights of its own kind. It measures 4.60 metres round the trunk and twenty-seven metres tall, figures from the national register that Italy's citizen tree register confirmed on the ground in October 2021, and its nearest protected neighbours are the twin chestnuts about thirty-five metres to the southeast, measured identical to the centimetre.
In any other city a plane this size would lead the page. Here it is one of nine on Italy's monumental register inside three hectares, which says more about the garden than about the tree. Muzio de Tommasini, botanist and podesta, laid the Giardino Pubblico out from 1854 and planted its planes himself, according to the city's parks service. This one is not individually dated, but its size fits that planting, which would make it somewhere around 160 to 180 years old.
The garden is a literary one as much as a botanical one. Busts of Trieste's writers line its paths, and Italo Svevo, whose novels are set in this city, walked here often. The plane has stood through all of it, through the port's Habsburg century and its Italian one, without anyone writing a word about this particular trunk until a register gave it a number.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
On the regional register's figures, the tallest tree in the Giardino Pubblico is not its biggest. This plane is listed at thirty-five metres, a metre higher than the great plane that holds the girth record for all of Trieste, on a trunk of 4.65 metres round, nearly eighty centimetres slimmer. If the numbers hold, it has put its growth into height where its neighbour put it into bulk.
The caveat is real. This tree's sheet appears in the national and regional registers but not in Italy's citizen tree register, which re-measured most of its siblings in 2021, so nobody has published an independent check of this trunk. The register is the only witness, and a height taken on a thirty-metre crown is harder to get right than a girth taken with a tape at chest height.
It belongs to the garden Muzio de Tommasini, botanist and podesta, laid out from 1854 on land bought from Benedictine nuns, where by the city's own account he planted the planes himself. No source dates this tree individually; its size puts it plausibly in that first planting, around 160 to 180 years.
If you stand under it with a rangefinder, or know the story of this corner of the garden, tell us. A tree this tall deserves a second measurement.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
The ground under this plane was meant for a church. Before it was a garden, the plot on Via Giulia was earmarked for a church and housing, and when that plan was dropped the land was bought from Benedictine nuns. From 1854 Muzio de Tommasini, a botanist who was also Trieste's podesta, turned it into the Giardino Pubblico, and by the city's own account he planted its planes himself.
This one stands at the western end of that planting, the farthest of them all from the great plane that holds the city's girth record. The regional register lists it at 4.37 metres round the trunk and thirty metres tall. That register is our only source for this particular tree: Italy's citizen tree register, which re-measured most of the garden's protected planes in 2021, has no entry for this sheet, so these figures have not been independently checked. They are plausible for the company it keeps, but they are one witness.
Nobody has dated it on its own. Its size fits de Tommasini's planting, which would make it around 160 to 180 years old, and that is an inference rather than a record. The garden around it has grown to some 320 large trees, and a church was never built.
If you measure it, or know more about this end of the garden, tell us.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
This plane is more than a metre slimmer than the garden's runner-up and two metres taller. The regional register lists it at 4.08 metres round the trunk and thirty-three metres high, which makes it one of the tallest trees recorded in the Giardino Pubblico on a trunk that, by this garden's standards, is modest. It has spent its life reaching up past the horse chestnuts around it rather than filling out.
Those figures come from the register alone. Italy's citizen tree register, which went round most of this garden's protected planes with a tape in October 2021, has no entry for this sheet, so no independent measurement of this tree has been published, and a thirty-three-metre height is exactly the kind of number that benefits from a second look.
The garden it stands in was laid out from 1854 by Muzio de Tommasini, the botanist who happened also to be Trieste's podesta, and he planted the planes himself according to the city's parks service. This tree has no date of its own; its place in that planting would make it roughly 160 to 180 years old, which is a reasonable inference and not a measurement. Through those years the city changed hands, the garden gained its busts of Triestine writers, and this plane kept climbing.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
Nineteen metres from the garden's biggest plane stands this one, and it spends its life being compared. It is listed at 4.02 metres round the trunk and thirty-one metres tall, which would lead the page in most cities. Next to the great plane of the Giardino Pubblico, 5.42 metres round and thirty-four tall, it looks like the younger brother, although nothing says it is younger.
The figures come from the regional register alone. Italy's citizen tree register re-measured most of the garden's protected planes in 2021 but has no entry for this sheet, so no independent check of this tree has been published. It is one of nine planes in the garden on the national list, and among the eight we map it is the slimmest.
It shares its history with its big neighbour. Muzio de Tommasini, botanist and podesta, opened the garden from 1854 on land bought from Benedictine nuns and planted its planes himself, according to the city's parks service. This tree carries no date of its own, but standing this close to the great plane in that planting, it is plausibly of the same generation, around 160 to 180 years.
Stand between the two and the difference in the trunks is the whole lesson in what 140 centimetres of girth looks like.
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · 160-180 years · Citta Vecchia
Two registers measured this horse chestnut and they cannot both be right. Italy's national and regional registers list it at 3.17 metres round the trunk and twenty-two metres tall. The citizen tree register, citing the same official sheet number, recorded a trunk of 2.10 metres and a height of ten metres in October 2021, at a point about thirty-five metres from the register's own coordinate. That is not a rounding difference. It is a different-sized tree.
Nobody has settled which figure belongs to which chestnut. The citizen measurement may have been taken on a neighbouring tree, the sheet number may have been attached to the wrong record, or the register may be wrong. We have not picked a winner, and the pin on this page marks the register's position, which may be a few dozen metres out.
What is not in dispute is the setting. It stands about a hundred metres north of the garden's twin horse chestnuts, identical to the centimetre at 3.35 metres, in the public garden Muzio de Tommasini began in 1854. No source dates this tree on its own; if it belongs to that first planting, it is somewhere around 160 to 180 years old.
If you find it and put a tape round it, tell us which number is right.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Barcola-Gretta
Two registers agree on this plane to the centimetre and disagree about which street it stands on. Italy's national and regional registers put it on Salita Madonna di Gretta; the citizen tree register, citing the same official sheet, gives its address as Via San Lazzaro 16. Both give the same coordinate, the same trunk of 3.60 metres round and the same height of twenty-five metres, so this is one tree with two labels rather than two trees, and the pin is the part to trust.
It stands alone. Nine of Trieste's protected planes share the three hectares of the Giardino Pubblico; this one is by the roadside on the slope between the Barcola seafront and Gretta, belonging to no garden and no grove. That makes it a useful stop on the way out toward Miramare, where the park's pines and redwoods wait.
Nobody has dated it. There is no planting record, no survey age and no story attached to it in any source we found, only the measurements, which the citizen register confirmed on the ground in October 2021. If you know when it was planted, or why this one was kept, tell us.