The inn beside it is named after it, in two languages. Trattoria Al Tiglio, Pri Lipi, which is Italian and Slovene for the same thing: at the lime tree. Basovizza is a Carso village above Trieste that has spoken both for a long time, and the building was a post station on the road from Trieste to Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century, where travellers changed horses. How old the lime is, nobody has written down. The parish newsletter calls it secolare, centuries-old, which is the word a village uses about a tree it has always had, and no survey has done better than that. The measurements are no tidier. The national monumental register lists it at 2.41 metres round and 11 metres tall; a field visit in August 2024 put the girth at about 3.30 metres. That gap is too wide to be carelessness with a tape, and the likeliest explanation is the trunk itself, which the same 2024 survey describes as sound but unusually shaped. Somebody put the tape somewhere else. The good news from that visit is the health rating: good, as of August 2024. It is a small-leaved lime, which means that for a fortnight around midsummer the tree announces itself before you have seen it, and the tables underneath are the obvious place to be while it does. If you have measured this trunk, tell us where you put the tape.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Basovizza village centre, beside Trattoria Al Tiglio - Pri Lipi, Via Bonetti/Basovizza, 34016 Trieste
You can recognise it by the shape, which the surveyors call unusual, and by the trattoria beneath it, Al Tiglio, Pri Lipi, named after the tree. It stands in the open in the middle of Basovizza village, 11 metres tall beside the road.
Free, stands in the open village square/roadside next to a public trattoria; always visible from the street, no gate reported
Bus 51 from Trieste Centrale (the same line that serves the Foiba di Basovizza memorial), about 20-25 minutes
In bloom
late June into July, when the lime flowers and the scent reaches the road before the tree does
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: Elenco degli alberi monumentali d'Italia (MASAF), no. 69/L424/TS/06
- masaf.gov.it
- decreti.regione.fvg.it
- ilregistrodeglialberi.it
- domenicale.diocesi.trieste.it
- basovizza87.it