Cles

On 29 April 1869, digging in a field called Campi Neri, a bronze plate came up with four holes at its corners: it had hung on a wall so that people could read it. This is the Tabula Clesiana, and it carries the edict by which in the year 46 the emperor Claudius granted Roman citizenship to the Anauni, the Tulliasses and the Sinduni — retroactively, so as to make good all the acts and contracts those peoples had signed while they were not yet Romans. The original is in Trento, in the Castello del Buonconsiglio; a copy can be seen at Cles.

About the name, on the other hand, nothing is certain: ecclesia, cleus, clusum, clavis, every guess has its supporters. The town chose the first, and an archival mistake is part of the story: the arms used from 1881 showed a building with two towers, which an armorial described as a church, ecclesia, when in fact it was Castel Cles with its twin towers. In 1931 the comune asked Rome to bear as its arms a church, emblem of the town, which from ecclesia took its name, and in 1939 the church was granted to it by decree. Bernardo Clesio came from here too, cardinal and prince-bishop, the man who organised the Council of Trent: his arms are still the emblem of the Trentino cooperative movement. And below the town, the Santa Giustina dam, finished in 1950, was then the highest in Europe.