Forte Marghera's Century Trees

This fortress spent most of its working life defending Venice from the mainland side, a threat the lagoon city had never needed to worry about until the railway bridge connected it to dry land in 1846. Built up from 1805 under a combination of Napoleonic and Austrian engineering, Forte Marghera anchored Venice's landward defences through the 1848-49 siege and into the 20th century, before eventually being decommissioned and left to the Comune. Its parade grounds and ramparts are now planted with large poplars, common limes, plane trees and hackberries that local sources describe simply as century-old, without giving any individual tree a specific planting date or measurement, so their exact age is unverified. What survives is less a single monumental specimen than the mainland's closest equivalent to the tree-lined avenues and gardens Venice's own islands mostly lack, run today by a foundation that has turned the fort into a venue for exhibitions and Biennale pavilions alongside its resident colony of cats.