The Fourth Plane of the Giardino Pubblico

This plane stands among the garden's horse chestnuts rather than with the heavyweights of its own kind. It measures 4.60 metres round the trunk and twenty-seven metres tall, figures from the national register that Italy's citizen tree register confirmed on the ground in October 2021, and its nearest protected neighbours are the twin chestnuts about thirty-five metres to the southeast, measured identical to the centimetre. In any other city a plane this size would lead the page. Here it is one of nine on Italy's monumental register inside three hectares, which says more about the garden than about the tree. Muzio de Tommasini, botanist and podesta, laid the Giardino Pubblico out from 1854 and planted its planes himself, according to the city's parks service. This one is not individually dated, but its size fits that planting, which would make it somewhere around 160 to 180 years old. The garden is a literary one as much as a botanical one. Busts of Trieste's writers line its paths, and Italo Svevo, whose novels are set in this city, walked here often. The plane has stood through all of it, through the port's Habsburg century and its Italian one, without anyone writing a word about this particular trunk until a register gave it a number.