The biggest of Miramare's six protected Aleppo pines is also the one nobody has put a date on. It measures 3.68 metres round the trunk and twenty-five metres tall, figures the national register gives and Italy's citizen tree register confirmed with its own tape in October 2021. The only pine of the six with a recorded age is a smaller one, 3.10 metres round, which that citizen register calculated at about 130 years. So the largest pine in the grove is dated here by its sibling and by the park itself: planted some time after the spring of 1856, when Archduke Maximilian began laying out Miramare on a bare limestone point, which puts it somewhere between about 115 and 170 years. Aleppo pine is the Mediterranean's own survival specialist, named after the Syrian city and built for heat, salt wind and almost no soil, which is roughly what Maximilian's gardeners had to offer before they carted earth onto the rock. It has done well on it. The six stand within a few hundred metres of each other and a stranger would struggle to rank them by eye. This one sits about fifteen metres from the second largest, and between them they make the grove's heaviest pair. Look for the thickest trunk and the tallest crown in that corner of the park.
Parco del Castello di Miramare, Viale Miramare, 34151 Trieste You can recognise it by the thickest trunk of Miramare's six protected Aleppo pines, 3.68 metres round under a 25-metre crown. It stands about fifteen metres east of a second pine, 3.34 metres round and noticeably lower.
Free, the park is open daily. Only the castle charges admission
Bus 6 from Piazza Oberdan to Grignano, about 25 min, then a short walk into the park