Chiarano

The name is a prediale toponym, that is one man's estate: it comes from the Latin personal name Clarius. For much of its history Chiarano was administered from somewhere else. When Venice divided the Treviso lands into podesterie the village was assigned to Motta di Livenza; in 1513 Leo X took the cure of its souls away from the diocese of Ceneda and gave it to the regular canons of a Venetian congregation, who kept it for two hundred and sixty years, until 1773. It became a comune of its own only under Napoleon, in 1805, and the shape it has today was given to it by the Austrian reform of 1815.

In 1917, when the front fell back to the Piave after Caporetto, Chiarano found itself right behind the fighting: the population had to be evacuated, and by the end of the war the village was destroyed. In the twentieth century farming shed hands with no factories to take them up, and people emigrated until the first plants opened at Oderzo, at Motta and finally here. Two things, though, have stayed: half of the Olmè wood, bought in 1891 together with the comune of Cessalto and one of the last strips of the old lowland forest, and, in summer, a race along the Piavon canal in old bathtubs.