The Bagolaro of Piazza Hortis

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.