Culture
The Tree That Ruined Your City’s Christmas
From Rome to Baltimore, the quality of the municipal Christmas tree can expose a city’s deeper failures.
A toilet brush. A plucked chicken. A disgrace.
When the Christmas tree installed in front of Rome’s Piazza Venezia was revealed in December 2017, it was described as all of the above. Not magical, but “mangy.” Not beautiful, but “bald.” (In Italian, Spelacchio, which translates into either modifier, became the tree’s nickname.) The 65-foot spruce was impressively tall, as state-sponsored trees are supposed to be, but barren of needles in many places; it drooped sadly, as if hexed by a family of holiday-hating elves. A week before Christmas, it was pronounced dead. Rome’s tree was, in a word, bad. And the Romans noticed.