The Maple of the Foiba di Basovizza

This maple was already well over a century old in May 1945, when the shaft it stands beside was used to kill people. The Foiba di Basovizza is a disused mine pit on the karst above Trieste. In the weeks after the German surrender, occupying Yugoslav troops threw Italian civilians and soldiers into it. Italy declared the site a national monument in 1992, and it is the principal place of mourning for those families and for the Triestines deported to camps in Yugoslavia in the same period. Entry is free and the grounds are open at any hour. The tree is an Acer monspessulanum, the small three-lobed maple of dry Mediterranean limestone, a species that seldom grows large. This one has reached 13 metres, and its trunk measures either 2.56 metres round or 2.35, depending on which survey you read: the national register recorded the larger figure, an independent field visit in October 2021 the smaller. Its age is given as about 205 years, calculated from a registered birth year rather than from the wood, so read it as two decades either way. People come to Basovizza for the monument and not for a tree, and that is the right order. The maple is older than any of it, older than the memorial and older than what the memorial records. The documentation centre beside it keeps seasonal hours. The grounds, and the maple, do not close.