The Horse Chestnut of Via Nazionale

Trieste's protected trees stand in designed grounds: a Habsburg's experimental headland, the public garden a botanist mayor laid out, the wooded hill above it. This one stands on a state road. The horse chestnut at Via Nazionale 51 grows up on the karst plateau at Opicina, a tram ride out of Piazza Oberdan, with the SR58 running past it and a footway in between. It is 324 centimetres round and fifteen metres tall, and the honest thing to say next is that we know nothing else about it. Neither of Il Piccolo's surveys of the city's old trees mentions an Opicina chestnut. No age has ever been published. The only document that names it is the protection order itself, issued nationally and republished by the region, which is one source wearing two covers rather than two sources. The frontage is public and has a pavement along it; whether the trunk itself sits just inside a gate at number 51 is the one thing we could not settle from here. Come in May. A horse chestnut in flower holds hundreds of white spikes upright at once and reads as a flowering tree from the far end of the street. By August most European ones are going brown, from a leaf-mining moth that crossed the continent in the 1990s, and the walk is worth less. If anybody up there knows this tree's age, or owns a tape measure, we would like to hear it.