The Downy Oak of the University Campus

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.