The Plane at the Borgo Medievale

The medieval village beside this tree was built in 1884 and there is nothing dishonest about it. Alfredo d'Andrade put up the Borgo Medievale for the Esposizione Generale Italiana as a full scale working model of a fifteenth century Piedmontese village, copying real buildings from real valleys, and it came out so well that the city kept it instead of pulling it down. The plane standing near it is thirty-six metres tall and five metres ten round, the second tallest tree on Turin's monumental register, and it is genuinely old in a way the village is not. The register bands it between one hundred and two hundred years, so it may well have been a young tree already standing when the exhibition opened. Three monumental oaks grow beside it, registered as a group rather than as individuals, which is why they get no entries of their own here. What makes this stretch worth slowing down for is the scale of the contrast: a row of low timber and stone houses with the roofline of a small mountain village, and then one tree going up more than twice their height directly behind them. The village courtyard is free to walk into.