The Caucasian Elm of Villa Sartorio

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.