The Aleppo Pine of 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.