San Canzian d'Isonzo

In Roman times the place was called Aquae Gradatae, the via Gemina and the via Annia passed through it, and here worked one of the nine purple dyeworks that operated in Italy by imperial concession. In 303 three Roman nobles — Cantius, Cantianus and Cantianilla — were beheaded here together with their teacher Protus: they had left Rome to escape the persecutions, were arrested at Aquileia and set free again by virtue of the house they belonged to; then Diocletian ordered them to be taken again, and they were caught near Aquae Gradatae. At Aquae Gradatae a senator, Chrysogonus, was also martyred, and his stone sarcophagus, with that of Protus, is still in the town. The first written attestation is of the seventeenth of February 819, when Louis the Pious assigned the goods confiscated from a Lombard rebel to the Benedictine monastery that stood here.

This town's name has been rewritten more than once. In 1028 Conrad II confirmed the jurisdiction of Aquileia as far as the Timavo but allowed San Canziano to be exchanged for Muggia, and so the place ended up under the bishop of Trieste. It was Venetian from 1420, Austrian after Campoformio, Italian only after the first world war; the present name, with the addition of d'Isonzo, came by royal decree in 1923, and in the same year the comune received the hamlet of Isola Morosini, detached from Fiumicello. Until 1948 it lay in the province of Trieste. Until the fall of Fascism the coat of arms carried the capo del Littorio; what is left on it are three crosses the colour of blood, for the three martyrs. And on the thirtieth of June 1946, when the Giro d'Italia came through Pieris, a group of Tito's supporters stoned the riders: the police dispersed the demonstrators, one officer was hurt, the stage was broken off and resumed at Miramare, near the finish, with the symbolic victory of Giordano Cottur of Trieste — but many had already set out for Udine. Fabio Capello was born at Pieris.