How do you do — I am Italus, and I am 1,230 years old. I live in the Pollino National Park, in Calabria, in a secret location at almost two thousand metres above sea level, not far from the border with Basilicata. I am a Bosnian pine, and I can pride myself on being Europe's oldest pine tree.

That's right: Italus, named in honour of the king of Oenotria who ruled the region at the crossroads of the Bronze and Iron Ages, was discovered by Gianluca Piovesan, professor of Forest Sciences at the University of Tuscia, who led a team of researchers from the park and the University of Salento. It stands more than 10 metres tall, has a diameter of 160 centimetres, and "its age exceeds the record held by Adonis, a pine of the same species discovered in 2016 in the Pindus region, on the border between Greece, Albania and Macedonia, by almost 200 years," reports the meteorology website 3Bmeteo.com.

Italus is a witness to 1,300 years of history

The tree's trunk is hollow, so to determine its age scientists had to extract eight wood samples from the roots and subject them to radiocarbon dating. Analysing them makes it possible to obtain a series of valuable pieces of information, including a reconstruction of peaks in solar activity in the region, 3Bmeteo.com continues. "We have a witness to what happened in that area over the last 1,300 years," explains Gianluca Quarta of the Centre for Applied Physics, Dating and Diagnostics at the University of Salento. The research findings have been published in the journal Ecology.

There may be other ancient trees on the Pollino

Italus, despite its great age, has begun to grow again. On the Pollino massif it has found a place of refuge from climate change: the researchers are convinced it is not the only one, and that the region is home to other thousand-year-old trees. "Environments such as the rocky Bosnian pine forests or ancient woodlands deserve special protection," explains Gianluca Piovesan, "as they play an irreplaceable role in conservation biology and therefore in sustainable development." Italy continues to prove itself a land of records, and above all a treasury of biodiversity unique in the world.