What is the oldest tree in Trieste?
The oldest tree in Trieste is the London plane standing at the Boschetto roundabout on Viale al Cacciatore, which the municipality puts at over 200 years. That makes it older than every public garden in the city, including the Giardino Pubblico laid out in 1854 and the park at Miramare begun in 1856. It is five metres round the trunk and twenty-five metres tall. The largest tree in Trieste is a different plane, in the Giardino Pubblico, at 542 centimetres of girth and about 180 years old.
Nothing in Italy's official record of monumental trees will tell you a tree's age. The national MASAF register lists 47 protected trees in the comune of Trieste with species, girth, height and a coordinate, and the regional Friuli Venezia Giulia decree that feeds it adds a place name and the legal reason for each designation, but neither carries an age field or any note of whether a tree is still healthy. Every date on this page therefore comes from elsewhere: from the municipality's own survey of its 48 oldest trees, which puts the Viale al Cacciatore plane above 200 years and the great plane of the Giardino Pubblico near 180, and from the founding dates of the gardens themselves. Those dates are firm. Muzio de Tommasini, botanist and podesta, began the public garden in 1854 on land bought from Benedictine nuns and planted the planes himself. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg started the Miramare park in the spring of 1856 and kept ordering plants for it even after he had left for Mexico. A tree in either place is as old as the garden around it or a little younger, which is the honest way to date most of this list.
One of Trieste's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip, a themed collection spanning several cities.