Chiusa

The name is a narrowing: from the Latin clausa, the point where the gorge of the Isarco closes. It appears in writing in 1027, in a document of Conrad II in favour of the bishop of Brixen, as Clausa sub Sabiona sita, «the narrows below Säben». The coat of arms says the same thing in a picture: a silver key on red, the name and the function together, because from here the alpine passage could be barred to an enemy. It was used as a seal from 1448, is known of from 1397, and was formally granted in 1540 by cardinal Bernhard von Cles.

Above the town stands the monastery of Säben, which between the ninth and the eleventh centuries was an important bishop's see, before the see moved to Brixen. In 1494 Albrecht Dürer stopped here to draw a town he liked very much, and his impressions are thought to be fixed in the engraving Das große Glück. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Klausen was full of artists, most of them from Germany; and in 2002 the German writer Andreas Maier gave the town's German name, Klausen, to one of his novels.