Marzabotto is a little town 17 miles south of Bologna in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. Today, Mazabotto has a population of fewer than 7000 people. For a small town, Marzabotto records a long history starting in the Etruscan era and nearly ending with the worst massacre of civilians committed by the Waffen SS in Italy, almost 800 of them according to the best estimates.

You get downtown via a stump-lined viale, Italian for a wide, tree-lined street. But what you see are carved stumps with flowering cherry trees planted beside them. So here’s the story. When the maritime pines transforming the via into viale became impossible to maintain, the mayor didn’t just decide to whack them down and rip them from the soil, he had them cut down and then employed the local tree artist group Motosegarte to create art out of the remaining stumps.