The Third Aleppo Pine of Miramare

Fifteen metres from the largest Aleppo pine at Miramare stands the second largest, and the gap between them is 34 centimetres of girth and five metres of height. This one measures 3.34 metres round and twenty metres tall. Those are the national register's figures, and Italy's citizen tree register found the same trunk at the same point in October 2021, which is as close to certainty as a measurement of a living tree gets. It belongs to a protected group of six pines in the park, and the group is the point. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg started Miramare in 1856 as a test of what would grow on a bare limestone promontory above the Adriatic, and a pine built for drought, salt wind and thin soil was the obvious answer to the question he was asking. None of the six is dated individually except a smaller sibling put at about 130 years, so this one is placed somewhere between roughly 115 and 170 years by that sibling and by the park's own start date. Maximilian never saw it grown: he left for Mexico and was shot there in 1867. If you want to stand between the two heaviest pines in the grove, this is the western half of the pair.