The Plane of the Boschetto Roundabout

Trieste's oldest tree stands on a traffic roundabout. The municipality's survey of its 48 monumental trees puts this London plane above 200 years, which makes it older than every park in the city: older than the Giardino Pubblico begun in 1854 a kilometre downhill, older than the Miramare park begun in 1856, older than the Ferdinandeo villa on the slope above it. It was in the ground when Trieste was still Austria's only real seaport and the road it stands on was a country lane. It is five metres and ten centimetres round the trunk and twenty-five metres tall. The London plane was the tree of choice for the avenues and gardens Trieste built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which is why nearly a fifth of the city's protected trees are planes, and this is the survivor from the first of those plantings. A second registered plane stands twenty-five metres away, 440 centimetres round, and the two of them frame the entrance to the Boschetto del Ferdinandeo, the wooded hill that Triestini have walked up on Sunday afternoons for as long as the trees have been there. Take Via Giulia out of the public garden and keep climbing.