Like the evolution and transformation of history, crime and slang, the stages of the Matibo affair continued to evolve:

After taking a rest for a week or two from the mystery. Bill found another engraving of a tree-house in Italy. It was published 3 years earlier and clearly, it was the same one. The engraving had been slightly modified, showing that the Wiesener, had been a bad, bad boy. You can see the resemblance here;



Black and white engraving, unsigned, of large tree shaped into a tree house or arbre-belveder, with two stories.  Two people are on the first story at one window.  There is a stairway, wooden, from the ground to the start of the leaves.  Several people, male and female are on the ground in the fashions of the period, 1837.

(Acero existente in Matibò vicino Savigliano.)
[A maple tree existing in Matibo, in the vicinity of Savigliano.]



At that time, the site had this listing description:


SAVIGLIANO CN. “Acero esistente in Matibò vicino Savigliano.”
     Litogr. da:“Poliorama Pittoresco.”
     Napoli, 1837.” @ 12,00
     cm. 10x16. Testo del marchese Lascaris di Ventimiglia.


Bill Thayer, with his Italian fluency, continued to look for any traces of the Tree House of Matibo in Italy. He discovered an earlier engraving of the tree, dated 1837 or 1838, with an article relating to it, in Tome VI of the Repertorio d’agricoltura, edited by Rocco Ragazzoni, published in 1837 in Vigevano. Vigevano, he says, is “a town which although in Lombardy not Piemonte, is only 121 km NE of Savigliano  — a fast hour’s drive.“. The article is also published, on page 132, with the folded picture on page 160, in the Repertorio di agricoltura pratica e di economia domestica, edited by Rocco Ragazzoni, St. Alliance, 1835.

Bill also points out:


Notice also that the Italian-language caption puts an accent on Matibò. That doesn’t affect Google searches, but it does indicate that in some Italian’s mind it was pronounced matiBO.

The relevant text actually starts on p. 132: it’s a letter to some learned society, by the Marquis Lascaris of Ventimiglia, who is styled “Ordinary member“. It is titled “Pregio poco conosciuto dell’ acero campestre“ (Poorly-appreciated worth of the common maple).

Page 132, paragraph 1, is about how nice that people import exotic trees to beautify their gardens. Paragraph 2 goes on to say that there’s no need to range so far, however, when we have beautiful trees of our own right here in Italy, which we might do well to appreciate a bit more, among which the common maple, which is pretty, doesn’t impoverish the soil, and its boughs are flexible  — which allows us to train them into whatever shape we please.


Then he goes on to p133:


Un proprietario apprezzatore dell’ acero ne possiede due bellissimi individui in un podere chiamato Matibò, a mezzo miglio da Savigliano, uno de’ quali (ved. la fig.) dell’ altezza di diciassette piedi piemontesi, conta settant’ anni di età, e venticinque dacchè venne tagliato a capitozza, e dacchè ha ricevuto esternamente la forma di un elegante tempietto rotondo a porticato, il cui diametro è di undici piedi. L’ accurato proprietario ha divisa la parte interna di questo edifizio in due distinti piani, uno inferiore all’ altro: si arriva al primo per una scala esterna, ed al secondo col mezzo di altra scala con somma maestria praticata internamente. I due piani possono agevolmente contenere una ventina di persone caduno, ed il loro pavimento è formato coi rami dell’ albero stesso fortemente tessuti e collegati che hanno spinto radici nella terra sovrappostavi, la quale viene ogni anno concimata ed anche innaffiata.

Le pareti dell’ albero sono assai fitte, attesa la costante accurata potatura che ricevono nella state e l’ ingegnoso incrocicchiamento delle nuove messe, per cui le due sale ricevono la luce dalle sole otto finestre intagliate in caduna di esse. L’ albero così frastagliato produce nulladimeno da lunga pezza sorprendente quantità di foglie, di fiori e di semi; gli augelletti vi si compiacciono, e siccome il padrone lungi dal recar disturbo ai loro lavori ed alle loro famigliuole, vi appresta cose grate per nudrirsi ed utili per formare i loro nidi, essi moltiplicano in pace, siccome in tetto ospitale, in cui al giungere della primavera riprendono stanza, rallegrando col dolce garrir loro, in presenza di chi viene visitargli, la naturale amenità del luogo, e quel delizioso quartierino campestre. Ma lasciando in disparte queste imagini, mi farò ad insistere, perchè gli agricoltori non abbandonino ai soli boschi, ai soli vigenti un albero indigeno cotanto utile, il quale oltre al pregio di essere riconosciuto il migliore per la formazione de’ torni pei carri, de’ gioghi per le bovine, pel sostegno dei vigneti, e per l’ eccellenza del suo legno da ardere, ha pur quello di poter vittoriosamente concorrere all’ abbellimento dei giardini, e di esser atto assai a somministrare ovunque siepi capaci di qualsivoglia sàgoma veramente fitte ed impenetrabili. (Calendario Georgico.)


Bill translated this, thankfully:


A landowner who appreciates the maple has two very handsome specimens in a property called Matibò, half a mile from Savigliano, one of which (see the fig.), 17 Piemontese feet tall, is seventy years old, and has been pollarded for twenty-five years now, having received the outer form of an elegant round porticoed tempietto, eleven feet in diameter. The careful owner divided the inside of this edifice into two separate stories, one below the other: you get to the first by an outer staircase, and to the second by means of another staircase built with great art on the inside. Each of the two stories can easily hold about twenty people, and their floors are formed of the branches of the tree itself, tightly interwoven and tied, that have rooted in the earth put on top of them, which is manured and even watered every year.

The walls of the tree are quite dense, in view of the constant careful watering they get in the summer and the ingenious interweaving of the new shoots; light is provided to the two rooms solely by the eight windows cut into each. The tree thus ornamentally cut nevertheless has been for a long time producing a surprising amount of leaves, flowers, and seeds; the little birds are happy there, and since the owner, far from disturbing their work and their little families, lays out for them nice things to eat and make their nests with, they multiply in peace, as under a hospitable roof, under which they take their place again when spring comes round, cheering by their sweet chirping, in the presence of whoever comes to visit them, the natural amenity of the place, and this delightful little rural area. But setting aside these images, I will insist that farmers should not just abandon to the woods an indigenous tree that is so useful, and which, in addition to the merit of being recognized as the best for making coach axles, yokes for cattle, vine props, and for the excellence of its fuel wood, furthermore has that of contributing with success to the beautification of gardens, and of being quite suited to making hedges anywhere, of any shape, truly dense and impenetrable.


Bill adds, “The Piemontese foot, by the way, according to Web sources, was 51.3 cm: so that (our own foot being 30.5 cm) that tree is reported as being 28 feet 7 inches tall, and 18 feet 6 inches in diameter.“

The article in text, ended listing Ragazzoni’s text cited the source where this letter first appeared. It was an article taken from the Calendario Georgico, 1837, but it did not mention an author, the signature at the end of the article being Anonimo. The engraving was scanned improperly and only a portion of the engraving appears. It is clearly a corner of our tree-house!

Bill then found that the article was reproduced once more with a copy of the engraving shown above from another magazine, Poliorama Pittoresco, Naples, 1837, the same year as the one in Ragozzi’s anthology. But they they cite it incorrectly and that the text id by “Marquis Lascaris,” instead of just being from the magazine he directed.

As you can see: The article in Le Magasin Pittoresque is after the Lascaris piece, and translates what Anonimo says and did not source Lascaris. So, I am sad to say, my beloved Magasin pitt. has to join the ranks as one of the scoundrels!

A copy of the engraving is sold at irregular intervals, after being ripped out of those old journals, usually from the Poliorama Pittoresque. It sells all the time, which is why they do it and why the links to it we found are not current.

(This reminds me of how much I hate it when anybody tears up an old book just to sell the pictures. Don’t ever buy one!)

The Società Agraria Subalpina published the Calendario Georgico and it was under the umbrella of la Reale Società Agraria di Torino, founded in 1785 in Turin, (per wikipedia and Calendario reale georgico ossia almanacco d'agricoltura,, Torino: Stamperia degli Eredi Botta, 1791), by an edict of Victor Ameadeus III, King of Sardinia. Agostino Lascaris, Marquis of Ventimiglia (1766-1838), was its first director (general editor) and contributed several articles to it as well.

The issues of the Calendario Georgico are not online currently. Bill adds:


Lascaris, by the way, is a most eminent noble name: the Lascaris family is descended from the Byzantine emperors by the same name. See this Wikipedia article for the account of how they happened to be counts of Ventimiglia.

“And Italian Wikipedia (in no other language) has a brief but valuable article on Lascaris; interestingly, he was mayor of Turin in 1818, a founder and president of the Chamber of Commence of Piemonte  — and his residence there is now the seat of the Piemonte Region.

“And a much fuller biography of Lascaris is provided by his obituary.

“By the way, Cibrario  — the guy who wrote Lascaris’ obituary  — was a pal of Lascaris’, and co-published with him the first history of Sardinia ever to make it into print: a 4 volume work written in the 16c (in Latin) that they went and dug up.

[2/28/2012] Oh, and the Piemontese mile is 2466 meters, a tiny bit more than 1½ miles of our own.

Conversely, it now seems quite clear that Ratibor is, as we both guessed, an attempt to correct Matibo. The person who first came up with Ratibor did what we did, and finding no placename Matibo, “corrected“ it. The reason he found no placename Matibo is the same as our reason: [if it existed] it was the name of a private estate, and these things aren’t on maps no matter how detailed.”


And the trail stopped here, in February, 2012. But at least the Le Magasin Pittoresque, and Wiesener did not invent anything. But it seems the author of the text also plagiarized the text from the Italians and Wiesener basically copied the earlier Italian engraving and made a few minor changes only. But it is still strange that nothing more can be found about “Matibo,“ or its owner, or any other discussion of the tree house. Bill agrees and adds:

Then in March, 2012, after no further luck, by either of us, I began to write Part 2, of the mystery. In the meantime, another person e-mailed me and had pointed out to me the copy of the engraving for sale on MareMagnum that I had seen. I wanted to thank him online for helping and send him news that Part 2 was finished. (His e-mail has since vanished from my e-mail inbox, before I could thank him!!!)

When I went to check for a copy of either picture, it had vanished from the internet. This lead to another search for the copy and by sheer luck, after Bill and I both searched eleventy-seven thousand ways for word about this tree, I came across a press release from Italy in 2004. It is a picture of a large group of people including children apparently at a party, and it mentions Matibo and its maple tree! (An acero). It can be found on this webpage: Luigi Botta per Savigliano.

The text is in Italian, and the lines that seemed to me to be about our tree are “Con una immediata sorpresa: quella di essere nella storica residenza della Vernea (a due passi dal Matibo che ospitò il celebre acero saviglianese trasformato in un edificio a più piani), una delle più interessanti e curiose esistenti alla periferia di Savigliano, fatta realizzare nel Settecento per il piacere della residenza estiva e per incontrare,f;.“

Needless to say, I had no clue what this meant in English, but at least it appeared that I had found something concrete putting Matibo in Savigliano. Matibo had lost its accent, it seems. Naturally, I sent my hot scoop to Bill!

Bill states that this is page by Luigi Botta who was running for mayor when it was written. He says, the text is “of no interest at all for our purposes: Emilio Bosio had a party for the people shown, who were supporters of Luigi Botta for Mayor; Bosio himself was on the ticket too. By way of parenthesis, the writer of the page says it was at the historic residence of “la Vernea“, a stone’s throw from ’the Matibo [notice, no accent] that once had the famous maple of Savigliano transformed into a two-story building.’ End of story.“


“In addition to running for mayor in 2004, Luigi Botta is (probably, the name’s not so uncommon) the co-author of a book on the art history of Savigliano, with Rosalba Belmondo. That in turn led me to a website where he gets a full page: he’s a journalist and writer, and has written about Savigliano’s past  — as well as about the Sacco-Vanzetti case.


Look at the page by Botta or his election team, it’s a short page. It was a brief paragraph only under a picture of the dinnter guests. And since the sentence about the tree forms 20% of the paragraph, the only paragraph. I would say it is a fairly significant mention, the word for maple tree is acero, as I said before, and you can see it in the second sentence: “il celebre acero saviglianese trasformato in un edificio a più piani.” This certainly proves the tree-house was a great name to drop!

If Lascaris published a made up piece in his paper, I really think that since he was a politician, and a writer, he would have been gleefully attacked and bashed by anybody with an ax to grind. Since Botta, a modern politician and writer takes the time to mention the tree-house as a famous local landmark of old in his town, I am reassured that the tree is no myth.

The lack of any objection to this, leads me to believe that the tree was where we found it at last.

So Tree-house of Matibo is no more, but it did exist in Savigliano.





At this point! As of January, 2013, it seems that there is only one source for the text, and one for the picture. The picture in Le Magasin Pittoresque, was the earliest we found for weeks. About the same time Bill discovered the Lascaris reference, he found a copy of another engraving of the tree-house for sale by an Italian antiquarian bookseller. It is almost identical to the one that got us started on our quest, BUT predates the engraving done by Wiesener for the French article by about four years being listed as being from 1837-38. However, two current sellers of copies of the Italian engraving do not state what book they got it from, or who the engraver was. It is definitely “our” tree-house. This means, that in all likelihood that Wiesener’s engraving was merely a copy, with minor cosmetic modifications, of that one. Although he signed his engraving, he didn’t bother to mention that it was in imitation of the earlier one.

Also, Bill’s translation of the Lascaris’ article, shows that the text of French magazine article is almost an exact translation of the Italian one, without crediting the original source. So although nobody caught them, the French article and engraving were plagiarized and so join my list of literary scoundrels and rascals who knew a good story, with a great picture, when they saw it.

I don’t know about you, but it makes me totally happy to think it was there and someone did it. Thus of course confirming the fond wishes of everybody else who told the story. But the local report and the Lascaris bit make me far more confident that I am not totally gullible.

I feel so bad about not thanking the nice person who sent me the picture, having lost both his name and address!





So there are a couple of theories about the lack of any more evidence of this tree, anywhere. Bill, in March, 2012, initially said “you can’t pull the wool over locals.” However, he still thinks the proof isn’t 100% even now.

Bill still thinks (January, 2013), that the engraving of the tree-house could be imaginary and not taken “from life.”

There is a chance of that, sure. I don’t think we can definitely say that the first artist (the Italian version), never saw the tree. Not that it couldn’t happen. But again, especially if there was a journal with that picture in Italian, you would have thought there would have been an outcry if it was a completely unrealistic illustration of a local leafy landmark.

Remember, the preservation of journals is a tenuous thing. The libraries in Italy have not been scanned. For all we know the Italian picture and the article was a reprint from an earlier journal.

Most importantly, I can’t agree that the earlier Italian artist never saw the tree-house, and that there was no factual basis for the original picture. I don’t know enough to say if is a fantasy. We don’t know the context in which the earlier engraving appeared. Remember, the preservation of journals is a tenuous thing, especially short-lived ones, and the libraries in Italy have not been scanned. The Library in Savigliano may have a tourist brochure listing the Maple Tree of Matibo as a hot spot to visit!

How much can we trust any illustration in any medium? As our tree-tracking adventure shows. Merely the fact that an article is written by an "expert," a scholar, or that a lay-magazine has a high reputation does not guarantee that the words are true or accurate or even original. This applies equally well to any graphics that accompany those words. Photo-shop, painter’s brush, sculptor’s chisel, or engraver’s burin can all be wielded truthfully or deceitfully just like statistics.

There are hundreds of ‘true-to-life’ busts of Julius Caesar, all different.

Art can imitate life, though. Realism in art was crucial before photography.

The tree-house that charmed us all had to have an appeal that made it worth writing about, in highly descriptive terms, in the Calendario Georgico. So why should it not have been delightful as the engraving depicts? If it wasn’t a pleasing structure, it would not have merited a drop of ink in the first place.

I think it is likely. Local traditions about shrines, ghosts, tree-houses do not arise without some element/sprig of truth, however embellished the resultant version becomes. In his case, the tree is of relatively recent date. The description in a reputable professional journal also tends to support the truth. There were two copies of the original engraving in print in Italy along with the written account. There are no later attacks on either the article or the engraving suggesting that is figment of somebody’s imagination. If the tree was not that pretty or as described others would be sure to attack the engraver and the author for lack of fidelity.

Also, such a great tree, famous enough to make the press, makes everybody who doesn’t have one envious and would result in silence about their own less decorative shrubs. Nobody had anything to top it. Competition for glory and local fame would ensured minimizing another’s tree, in favor of their own if they had one better.





In either case, the deafening silence in Savigliano about this tree in its own country after the 1840’s is odd.

On mulling this over, I am reminded that in terms of the lack of publication of the person owning the estate, the press has long adopted protecting the privacy of the rich, noble, and powerful. It still goes on to a great extent. To be sure, the juiciest details are common fodder to titillate the star-struck masses but a great deal is never published.

This privacy is not just confined to the nobility, and merchant princes or captains of industry. In America, you can find nothing bad to say about judges anywhere, for example. Drunken, cheating, lying or not: unless they commit a crime (that somebody is brave enough to charge them with). Because of this virtual blackout by local presses, we, in the U.S. have no idea how human, and unjudicially much of the bench behaves.

The same is true everywhere, and I mean everywhere. If there was a talented noble or near noble person or person of any local power, who happened to have a fantastic garden, and everybody liked him or her, communities will do a lot to preserve their privacy as long as that seems to be in the best interests of the both the press and the community as a whole.

Communities will protect their own from strangers nosiness.

The other possibility that occurs to me is that the owner and/or creator of the tree was being hounded after that great picture occurred. It wouldn’t surprise me if people made pilgrimages to it! Everybody wanted to see it, everybody wanted a relic of it too, maybe, and would take away a branch, a leaf or a splinter. As we know, it inspired artists, and authors and sold paper and magazines for years.

The truth of this great tree-house sunk into oblivion for a reason, and I have decided its because it makes people lose their minds. I can only imagine what happened locally. Did the owners have to hire bodyguards to protect the tree and its birds? Did their homeowner’s insurance go up because of all the people who fell out of the tree-house having decided to use if for a sleepover?

When the proper sources clammed up, that stopped nobody. Since it was only worth a short paragraph or too, after all it couldn’t be sold or stolen, then the ongoing plagiarism and Wiesener’s touched up engraving which received international coverage was easy enough to do, and hard to verify. So it is stealing artwork literary and lithographic, but it’s not like stealing Titian, nobody cared enough to stop it.

The Curse of Matibo — Journalists, paralyzed by delight at the story and picture, recognized its appeal to us masses, and forgot all their good sense and just keep adding and twisting the story to be able to make use of it. The tree-house of Matibo and its story is too cute not to be worth a dime or two. And it certainly would not rouse anybody’s ire, making for a soothing and pleasing piece.

So people just kept stealing the work for decades, and maybe tried to steal pieces of the tree as long as it lived. The Matibo Story might be jinxed: The Maple Tree of Matibo is really The Tree of Doom. One look and you lose all good sense.




My conclusion is that the obscure Italian journal was seen by the French folks and that all the information about the tree afterwards was likely based on the French article, as we know the image likely was. It crushes me that French journalists and engravers were like the other scoundrels on my website, and failed to acknowledge the source of their data.

(I am happy to say, in their defense, that in most of the other articles I find in this magazine, which was hugely popular and a model for journalistic efforts (not to mention freely stolen from), they do say when they translate or summarize findings from other authors.)

This is a 200 year case study in plagiarism and bad scholarship though. It so clear that nobody has checked sources but us after 175 years. nobody, not even the “scholars” and “experts” in their fields.

This whole investigation into the existence and location of the tree has proved to demonstrate the absolute amorality, shoddiness in research, and out and out plagiarism and copyright violations in journalism, both academic and popular, on a widespread and persistent scale, up to the present century.

It demonstrates in why one should always check sources, as well as checking footnotes, to see if footnotes are in fact faithful.

Our efforts, which were quite relentlessly done in several languages, also shows the difficulties in doing internet research, with the changing results possible using the exact same keywords, during different hours of the day!

It is a reminder that despite all the scanning going on of the collections of major universities, there is a whole lot more that remains unscanned. The notable Italian journal series of Lascaris is not available on line in any form. This is a reminder that thorough research cannot depend solely on online resources whether free or by paid-access.

Although a better job of catching shifty scholarship is more possible now than ever before.

And finally, I would like to say as well, vain it may be, that it took two people who are not scholars or journalists to detect the history of international plagiarisim and flawed research and ultimately discover the probable source of the inspirational tree-house itself.

Although this is a picayune point in this case: who cares if the tree existed, really? It is the principle of the thing that does matter.

Hopefully this example will encourage people to not only do their own research, but make independent investigations of matters supposedly done by “authorities in their field.” Who knows what other contributions may arise, should anybody else get curious enough to double-check the “facts.”

It’s still one cute tree house! My house is not that pretty. The engraving takes all my half-formed fantasies of what my ideal tree house would be like and outdoes my imagination. Who could have thought of one so perfect and then made it?

There is more I want to know about the tree, its history, its owner, its designer: all of it.

People have been and still are intrigued by this tree-house, I am hoping that Fortuna, that fickle Latin goddess, will waft her wand over a Piemontese antiquarian or the gardener’s great, great, great grand-daughter and inspire them to write and tell us all we pant to know: Who owned the tree, who was brilliant enough to imagine such a tree, how did they make it and care for it, who played in or under it? Most important to me, is what or who inspired this gifted gardener to create something so lovely?

However, this article is great because it may lead to further discoveries. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if somebody recognizes the earlier engraving, or somebody from Savigliano sees it and knows all the missing bits?





I feel so bad about not thanking the nice person who sent me the picture, having lost both his name and address! That’s one Proof of the curse.





As a note, Bill also ran across the picture of another Italian tree-house! It’s an earlier engraving of an entirely different tree-house, this one dated 1742 in Florence, or as one caption has it, “B. S. Sgrilli. Description of the Pratolini garden for the Medici,” Firenze [Florence], 1742.” It looks more like Robert Louis Stevenson’s sort of tree-house. It is one of the pictures from a lecture on Aspects of Garden Design, given in 1994, according to the website, and there are some great pictures there!



Black and white engraving, signed by Sgrilli, of large and unshaped tree with a wooden ramp from the ground up to the middle.  There is a person on the ramp.  Around it are benches with people sitting on them. This is the Palestrini Garden of the Medici in Florence, 1742.

B. S. Sgrilli.
Description of the Pratolini Garden for the Medici.
Firenze, 1742.



I know nothing more about it or how it relates to its Matibo cousin.

The Matibo tree house was surely not the only one of its kind. And its designer had probably heard of such things before. The fact that there was one in Italy in the previous century perhaps inspired our Matibo gardener. Gardens, gardening, and landscape design have long been of interest, all the way back to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

So here are the two tree-houses you now know something about. The main article in the Magasin Pitteresque, an the others quoted they refer to some other curious trees as well. But they may be hexed too, so I am not looking into them right now.