Rome’s ‘mangy’ tree will not be just for Christmas
AT FIRST it was regarded as an international embarrassment, but there could now be life after death for Rome’s notoriously threadbare Christmas tree nicknamed The Mangy One.
The fate of the spindly spruce, which has been compared to a lavatory brush but which Romans have taken to their hearts, will be learnt today at a press conference in the town hall.
When the tree was first erected in early December in Piazza Venezia, the city’s main square, there was outrage over its drooping branches and lacklustre appearance, particularly after it emerged that the city council had paid €48,000 (£42,000) to transport it from the Trentino mountains in northern Italy. But indignation gradually turned to fatalistic resignation and then to grudging admiration for the tree, which is now festooned with dozens of messages of adoration, heavily tinged with irony. “There’s a Mangy One in all of us,” one couple wrote on an old train ticket, while another message read: “Spelacchio, you’re one of us.”
The tree has become “a rock star”, one Italian newspaper proclaimed this weekend. “Everyone goes to look at it. Everyone wants to touch it.”
There are plans to either put it on display in a museum, turn it into tens of thousands of pencils for children or use its timber to make a wooden shelter in which mothers could change and breastfeed their babies.