In November 1889, when the South Tyrol was still shrouded in the clear autumn light, Empress Elisabeth of Austria again came to Merano for one of her therapeutic stays. That landscape – suspended between Central Europe and the Mediterranean world – was a refuge for her: a place where time seemed to slow down and court obligations vanished like fog.
During that stay, the Empress expressed a desire to visit Bolzano, where her uncle, Archduke Heinrich of Austria, lived in a magnificent palace, the city residence of the House of Habsburg. It was a building with an ancient history: built in 1342, transformed over the centuries into a blend of Gothic, Baroque and neoclassical architecture and now known as the Campofranco Palace.
Heinrich, a cultured and reserved man, welcomed her into the inner courtyard of the palace. Sissi advanced lightly, moving her elegant step through the gardens, ramps and terraces that joined the Baroque palace to the new neoclassical “little palace” designed by Sebastian Altmann.
It was then that he felt the desire to leave a lasting memory within those walls, something that carried with it a deeper meaning than mere ornamentation.
A few days later, a crate arrived in Bozano from the imperial gardens. Inside, wrapped in damp gauze to protect its roots, rested a young Ginkgo biloba, the oldest surviving tree species still living on Earth: a “living fossil,” the only survivor of the Ginkgoales order, extraordinarily resistant to fire, insects, disease and even-as it would turn out in Hiroshima-to the devastating power of the atomic bomb.
Next to the plant was a note, written by Sissi herself: “In 1889 Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary gave this Ginkgo to her uncle, Imperial Royal Highness, Archduke Henry, as a token of her benevolence.”
Heinrich was deeply touched by the gift. He knew well the symbolic significance of the Ginkgo: a tree of longevity, friendship, and harmony, celebrated by Goethe in the famous poem dedicated to Marianne von Willemer, where the biloba leaf-double and one at the same time-represents the union of opposites, the mutual dependence of life forms.
As the Ginkgo was planted in the palace courtyard, in a position of honor where the morning light could fan the leaves, Sissi silently recalled those verses, an expression of her innermost essence, split between two irreconcilable natures: on the one hand, the Empress, petrified in the rigidity of protocol, which chilled every gesture, every emotion; on the other, the urgency of the restless nature of a free, instinctive woman, made up of sudden impulses and indefinite longings, who ran on horseback until the wind disrupted her thoughts, who sought the silence of the mountains, who took refuge in poetry and music as the only possible homeland.
Rising from the depths of memory were the words of the Poet:
“Ginkgo Biloba”
The leaf of this tree, from the East
entrusted to my garden,
Has the flavor of a secret sense,
As the wise man likes it.
It is one Creature,
In itself broken?
Or are they two, who have chosen
Of being one in the world?
To be answered,
I may have found the trail:
do you not hear in my singing
That I also amone and together double?”
In them he sensed as a hope for peace, the promise of a reconciliation between the kingship of the sovereign and the vulnerability of woman, between the discipline of steel and the fragility of crystal.
That is why the Ginkgo biloba seduced her so powerfully: in that divided and united leaf, ancient and ever new, Sissi recognized her own secret image, the drama of her existence: two opposite worlds that seek each other and coexist yet never fully merge.
The people of Bolzano watched in wonder as the tree grew, and each year in autumn it glowed a deep, almost regal yellow, like an empress’s cloak carved in light.
The Palais Campofranco’s Ginkgo biloba is still there, firm and bright, one of the city’s most significant botanical presences, considered by many to be a symbol of hope, a promise of health and prosperity.
This is evidenced not only by its well-known therapeutic, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory qualities and beneficial effects on blood circulation, but also by its incredible resistance to environmental trauma, which made it famous as a symbol of invincible adaptation, for being among the few living presences that survived the Hiroshima bomb.
And as the golden leaves fall like tiny wings on the ancient courtyard, it still seems possible to sense, in the light rustle of the wind, the silent step of Empress Sissi, the restless ruler who found in nature consolation for what the world could not offer her.
