The coat of arms of Chieve, granted in 1933, has keys, a boat and an anchor: harbour things, in a village of the Crema plain without a metre of navigable water. The explanation lies in a lake that no longer exists. Chieve grew up on the western edge of the Insula Fulcheria, on a rise that allowed people to escape the floods of Lake Gerundo, and by tradition it was the mooring place for the boats that went about on that lake; the keys are said to come from the dialect ciaf, the iron guard around a post found in excavations north of the village, to which the boats' ropes were tied.
The name, though, says something else. The first records are early medieval: a document of 886 speaks of vico Cleuba, others of 900 and 923 say In Cleba, one of 955 Clebo, and in 1082 there appears de loco Cleuve; in 1188 an official charter writes Clevum utrumque, "the one and the other Chieve", because the settlements were two, the lower and the upper. According to the scholar Valerio Ferrari the name comes from the Latin clevus, that is a slope, a rise, a slightly raised place — which is exactly what the site is like. The Crema historian Pietro Terni had instead proposed the "keys" with which the ancients supposedly locked up their ships: a fanciful hypothesis, the source says, and yet it ended up in the arms all the same.
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📅 Every year, on 23 April
On 23 April Chieve, a municipality of 2,240 inhabitants in the province of Cremona, celebrates its patron Saint George, to whom the town's church is dedicated; the town has the Torre dei Benzoni.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Chieve, but an easy day trip away.
