This picture was taken in the public garden of a small Tuscan village called Laterina. I am under a huge, and wonderful cedar that the locals affectionately call “the Alberone” (trad. Big Tree). Its branches form a monumental, articulated, and majestic structure.
I remeber a particularly arid year that caused the vegetation to suffer. Then a friend of mine, jokingly told me that the Alberone did not care about the drought, because it had its roots in the center of the earth. Actually, its colour was green and it was in excellent health. Since then I have always imagined it as not affected by contingent events.
Yet if you look at the top, you will see that despite its mammoth size, the Alberone‘s top is missing.
It is said that a bolt of lightning deprived him of the tip. Has Jupiter perhaps claimed its prerogatives on this tree that seems to all intents and purposes invincible? I don’t know, but sometimes when I get under its trunk to play, on spring afternoons or summer evenings, it almost seems to me that I participate in a small portion of its apparent eternity.
Photo by (c) Enrico Giulia