The Second Plane of the Giardino Pubblico

Seventeen centimetres of girth separate this plane from the garden's biggest. It measures 5.25 metres round the trunk and thirty-one metres tall; the garden's great plane, about fifty-five metres to the east, is 5.42 metres and thirty-four. That makes this the runner-up in the Giardino Pubblico and, on the national register's numbers, one of the thickest trees in the city. Italy's citizen tree register measured it again in October 2021 and found the register's figure exactly. The garden was begun in 1854 by Muzio de Tommasini, a botanist who was also the city's podesta, on ground bought from Benedictine nuns, and the city's own parks service records that he planted its avenue of planes himself. Nobody has dated this trunk on its own, but a plane of this size in this garden is the obvious candidate for his planting, which would make it somewhere around 160 to 180 years old. Since then the garden has filled with roughly 320 big trees and the bronze heads of Triestine writers, and Italo Svevo walked its paths often enough to write it into his books. Second place in a city of old trees is a long way from ordinary. Nine planes in this garden carry national protection, and this one comes within a hand's width of the largest.