The Bagolaro of 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.