“City Trees” (“Alberi cittadini”)

Translated by Marco Di Natale

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “City Trees” (“Alberi cittadini”), tr. Marco Di Natale. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2023.

“City Trees” ("Alberi cittadini”) was first published in the literary magazine Il Marzocco in the issue of March 4, 1900. It was never re-collected by Pirandello during his lifetime and did not appear in any of his volumes of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno). It was instead added to the Appendix by Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti in 1938.

This brief story offers a kind of impressionistic view of the trees growing in an urban environment. With no human protagonists to speak of and a limited amount of plot development, it could at first seem an outlier, neither representing Pirandello’s realist tendencies visible in many short stories – particularly in those set in Sicily or those depicting the lives and struggles of the poor and marginalized members of society – nor developing the typically Pirandellian themes of unstable identity, madness, suffering, or death that recur so frequently in across his corpus. However, the impressionistic visual style of the vignettes in this story resonates with Pirandello’s descriptive focus in other places, including his very first published tale, “Little Hut: Sicilian Sketch” (“Capannetta: Bozetto siciliano,” 1884), which likewise was never republished or collected by Pirandello during his life. The choice not to include these stories in his collected volumes could be read as an effort by Pirandello to distance himself from their style or themes. However, other similarities make this interpretation problematic: Pirandello’s sketch-like approach, as well as his interest in trees and in narrating the “life” or “experience” of a tree through an anthropomorphic lens are echoed in a critical essay from two decades later, “The Image of the ‘Grotesque’” (“L’Immagine del ‘grottesco’,” February 18, 1920), published in L’Idea Nazionale. There, Pirandello uses the same kind of narrative technique to construct a visual metaphor critiquing the limits of the grotesque theatre, against which he positioned his own notion of humor (umorismo). As in that later essay, here the first-person narrator takes on the role of a distanced spectator who nonetheless reads psychological and emotional meaning into the struggles of trees – in this case, the battle to escape the confinement of city pavement or the difficulty of being overshadowed by human buildings. The story thus becomes an existential reflection on the perception of urban life and the ways in which it contrasts with the vital drive of nature.

The Editors

What a bore it must be for you, you poor trees standing in rows along the avenues of the city and sometimes along the paved streets, here and there on the sidewalks, or solitarily springing up among small plants in some vast silent atrium of an ancient building or in some courtyard![1]

I know of a few, at the end of one of the widest and most populated streets in Rome,[2] that are truly pitiful. They have grown up miserable and squalid, and have almost a lost, fearful air, as if they were wondering what they were doing there, among so many busy people, in the midst of the deafening bustling of city life. With what sad wonder the poor trees see their reflection in the beautiful store windows! And it seems that they are pitying themselves, gently shaking their branches at each puff of wind.

Every time I walk along that street, looking at those little trees, I think of the many unhappy people who, attracted by the mirage of the city, have abandoned their countryside and come here to find sadness and to get lost in the maze of a life that is not for them. And as I am imagining the bitter and disconsolate thought of these unfortunates and their remembrance of that distant land, of the simple and better life that they once had there before that damned temptation brought them to spite by sparking their desire for another life; I also imagine with what lively and spontaneous joy these poor little trees would be alive in the open air, how their leaves would shine, and how their withered and saddened branches would stretch out to greet the pure air.

There: the short circle the street pavement traces around the trunk is all the countryside they have; because of it the drinks with difficulty the water of the sky and breathes. This narrow circle is also sometimes surrounded by an iron grid, offering a protection that may even seem cruel: the poor trees then seem to rise up from a prison, condemned to stay there; and they sleep and dream sadly, shaking from time to time, almost for a thrill of emotion, at the news that the gentle wind brings them from afar, from the already reborn fields that smile at the new April.

Ah, they too feel it, the poor city trees: they too sense something in the fresh and cheerful air. Under the hard, crushing pavement, exiled trees, the earth speaks to you of the renewed love of the sun, and you, trembling, listen to it, blessed in the thought that it has not forgotten you, so far away, lost in the chaos of the city. Under the countless houses that crush the earth, under the paving stones continuously trampled by restless people, spring lives, keeps on living, and you feel with your roots the ardor of its new life, which cannot keep itself hidden and almost foams from among the paving stones in tenuous blades of grass. Ah, you perhaps, looking at those small green tufts of grass, conceived the crazy hope that the earth wants to avenge you, to invade the cities to free you; and in a dream you see those blades of grass grow, and the street becomes a meadow; the city a countryside!

“Yes, but in the meantime, what are those street cleaners bent over, scraping the pavement?” You ask this to a sparrow that has come from the rooftops to perch on you; and the garrulous and gossipy sparrow answers you with a sneer:

"And don't you see? They are barbers: they trim the street’s beard.”

But even sadder is the fate of other city trees, which must not only escort the meaningless and filthy vanities of ours in an orderly procession along the sidewalks of the streets, , but which, in a tighter order, merging their various crowns, are forced to form almost a portico of vegetation.

The gardener's shears have evened out the tops of these trees symmetrically, and internally they have imposed a tunnel-like curve on the branches and, on the sides, loggia-like arches.

Thus deformed, mutilated with such skillful cruelty, to whom may these trees really seem beautiful and pleasing anymore? I confess that they give me a sense of disgust, as if they offered me a spectacle of perpetual torture. And I feel like shouting: "Just build your porticos of stone! These are living beings, who suffer and make people suffer: it is cruel to hold them back from the spontaneous sprouting exuberance of life!"[3]

Don’t you know, gardeners of Italy, that the death penalty has been abolished among us? The executioner is no longer there to cut off the head of whomever dares raise it above the leveling ropes of the law, that protective net for dwarfs, positioned barely higher than the mud. Now tell me why that poor frond that stands above the line imposed by your shears must be beheaded?

For these trees, oh gardeners, your profession is still that of the executioner!

And I know of a tree that was born, who knows how, in a cramped filthy yard next to an ugly street crowded with old houses. That poor tree had risen straight up on its skeletal cinereal stem, with evident effort, with clear struggle, almost tormented with the desire to see the sun and the air free of the fear of lacking the energy to reach beyond the roofs of the surrounding buildings. And it finally got there!

How happy were the top branches, and how much envy they wrought in those who were below, without air, without sun! Even in death, when falling from the autumn branches, the leaves up there were happier: they flew away with the wind up above, in the wind, fell on their roofs, and still saw the sky; while the poor leaves down below died trampled in the mud of the streets.

In every season, at sunset, that tree was filled with a myriad of sparrows, which seemed to gather from all the roofs of the city. Those branches throbbed more from the wings than from the leaves; it seemed that every leaf had a voice, that the whole tree sang happily.

From the windows of the houses the children watched, smilingly stunned at that dense, continuous, deafening aviary. Sometimes, an old man would look out of a window and clap his hands twice: then suddenly, as if by magic, the whole tree would fall silent, lifeless. Shortly afterwards, however, the noise would begin again: each sparrow would again intoxicate itself with its own sounds and those of the others, and the symphony would gradually become thicker and more deafening than before.

Now it happened one fine day that the owner of the house in whose courtyard the tree had grown thought of raising the surrounding walls by adding another floor. And so the tree, which with so much strife had earned the freedom of the sun, of the open air, bent its top discouraged over its trunk.

“Come on, come on!” it seemed that the sparrows dwelling on the roof were shouting from the gutters, and they were taking flight to incite him to rise up: “Up, up!” And perhaps they also repeated to the old tree those usual phrases, those useless tips, those vain admonishments that one gives to the fallen and the discouraged: “Brace yourself! Don't be demoralized! Gather your strength! Get up!”

But the old tree had no more strength to live. He had made such a hard time coming up to that height: he couldn’t go any longer.[4] Better to die.

Still, thousands and thousands of sparrows gathered on the old tree to sing. But the tree no longer seemed to echo the voices anymore. The sparrows lived: the tree was dead, bent over itself. And in vain, the sparrows with their chirping tried to bring him back to life.