Opinion

On the trail of the perilous pines – Frank McNally takes his chances with one of the lesser-known hazards of Rome

“The pines have become a particular danger of late, for historical reasons. And yet again, it appears, Mussolini is in part to blame.”

Thu Feb 28 2019 - 18:30

While our rugby team’s madcap police escort received widespread attention last weekend, another of Rome’s hazards seems to have gone largely unnoticed by Irish visitors. In fact, insofar as I noticed the phenomenon myself, it was only to admire its beauty, oblivious to the risks involved.

Near the ancient Forum ruins on Monday, I stopped to admire the statuesque stone pines that line the streets there and in much of the old city. One of the classic sights of southern Europe, the trees are also called umbrella pines because of their shape, although insofar as this resembles an umbrella, it’s one blown inside out.

To me, especially in Rome, their trunks are more suggestive of long, slender arms, spreading out at the top into fingers, holding aloft offerings of greenery to the gods. In this poetic mindset, I stopped to take some pictures of them, and survived the experience unharmed. But as I know now, that same morning, across the city near the Vatican, a similar pine came crashing down on the Viale Mazzini, crushing cars and injuring two people.

Nor was that an isolated incident. Rome’s parks, cemeteries, and other tree-filled sites had been closed over the weekend after a storm on February 23rd caused general havoc. The pines, however, have become a particular danger of late, for historical reasons. And yet again, it appears, Mussolini is in part to blame.

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Emblematic of Rome as they now are, umbrella pines are not native to the city. They were brought there from Greece, and as a rule prefer the fresh air of coastal regions to urban areas. Indeed, they are not as useful in hot, car-polluted Rome as, for example, the densely foliaged plane trees, which provide more shade and absorb more noise and harmful emissions.

But their good looks have long condemned pines to be planted in Rome anyway, inspiring poets, painters, and musicians. Their part in life there is immortalised by Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome: a four-part “symphonic poem” in which trees from the Appian Way, Janiculum Hill, Villa Borghese, and the Catacombs are the backdrop to scenes set at four different times of day.

That was composed in 1924, by which year a certain dictator had also taken root in Rome. Like many symbols of the city’s former greatness, pines were part of Mussolini’s rejuvenation plans. In the 1930s, he planted the first of many new ones. And in a less stressful environment, those would now be in their prime, only entering middle age.

Instead they are prematurely old. As the website wantedinrome.com put it this week: “Planners in the 1930s also overlooked [the fact] that, in an urban setting, pines’ natural 180-year lifespan is halved, leading to the recent spate of headlines: ‘SOS Pini’, ‘Tree hits cab/supermarket/rail tracks’, or ‘Montesacro: Fear at Dawn’.”

Even when not falling, they pose other problems. Roots from Rome’s various old trees cause big cracks in roads and pavements: a factor blamed for the death of a young female motorcyclist last summer.

But the premature obsolescence of the 1930s pines is now an especially acute issue, one of many with which mayor Virginia Raggi must wrestle. After the latest collapse, she went on Facebook to urge a cull of old and sickly pines. “We must have the courage to say that an extraordinary action is needed: an action that will inevitable change the landscape of Rome,” she posted.

Young, glamorous, and elected on a protest vote as part of the populist Five Star Movement, Raggi has herself been facing protests as the city’s problems mount. Thousands staged a sit-in near the Forum last Autumn, to express frustration at the many examples of urban decay, from potholed roads to uncollected rubbish.

The mayor can justly blame legacies of history: from Fascist-era trees to more recent Mafia-rigged municipal contracts. But critics say she and her populist colleagues lack the competence to solve the problems that got them elected.

Ominously in this vein, another thing umbrella pines resemble, at least at the top, are clouds. Even so, Rome’s current difficulties can be placed in useful historic perspective, thanks to a certain city to its south.

Nineteen centuries ago, Pliny the Younger recorded his family’s memories of a strange cloud that appeared one August afternoon years before, from the direction of Mount Vesuvius. As recalled by them, he wrote, the cloud “rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches”. It was best described, he thought, “as being like an umbrella pine”.

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