The Third Horse Chestnut of the Giardino Pubblico

Two registers measured this horse chestnut and they cannot both be right. Italy's national and regional registers list it at 3.17 metres round the trunk and twenty-two metres tall. The citizen tree register, citing the same official sheet number, recorded a trunk of 2.10 metres and a height of ten metres in October 2021, at a point about thirty-five metres from the register's own coordinate. That is not a rounding difference. It is a different-sized tree. Nobody has settled which figure belongs to which chestnut. The citizen measurement may have been taken on a neighbouring tree, the sheet number may have been attached to the wrong record, or the register may be wrong. We have not picked a winner, and the pin on this page marks the register's position, which may be a few dozen metres out. What is not in dispute is the setting. It stands about a hundred metres north of the garden's twin horse chestnuts, identical to the centimetre at 3.35 metres, in the public garden Muzio de Tommasini began in 1854. No source dates this tree on its own; if it belongs to that first planting, it is somewhere around 160 to 180 years old. If you find it and put a tape round it, tell us which number is right.