Isera

Shortly after the Second World War, while the nursery school was being built, a Roman villa came to light at Isera. The excavations begun in 1973, carried out by the civic museum of Rovereto and later with the university of Trento, revealed it as a unicum in the whole of Trentino-Alto Adige: for the antiquity of its plan, the quality of its architectural decoration and the abundance of its finds. It was built in the age of Augustus on an artificial masonry base, laid out in terraces facing the valley which have now disappeared entirely; what has been excavated lies in the open ground and under the floors of the school, and the rest must go on southwards, under the parish church. There are rectangular rooms set comb-fashion, a kitchen with its hearth, the private baths heated by a hypocaust and, on the front, an apsed room which was probably a nymphaeum. It was abandoned between the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, after a very violent fire, and nobody rebuilt it.

The arms of the comune are the record of an aggregation: that of 1928, which put four comuni together. The red turreted palace on a silver field belongs to the Lichtenstein-Fedrigotti of Lenzima; the silver eagle on blue to Patone; the blue field to Reviano-Folas; and the bunch of Marzemino grapes on a silver shield to Isera and Marano — because Marzemino is the wine of this hillside, the one Mozart has his Don Giovanni call for. On a spur of rock stands Castel Corno, built on a heap of boulders fallen from Monte Biaena and named after its shape. It is small, and it was a military post rather than a house: the old inventories list a few benches, a table and little else, and only in the sixteenth century, under the Liechtenstein, did it become a noble residence of any quality. Its lower part is more recent than the upper one, so climbing through it is going back in time; and the upper part may once have been reached by a wooden ladder that could be drawn up in case of danger.