Arsiero

Four explanations circulate for the name of Arsiero and none is documented with certainty, but the comune chose the most literal and put it on its coat of arms: an uprooted tree trunk, kindled by two flames. The others are just as plausible: the Latin arserium from arx, a fortified place, and indeed on the height where the archpriest's church stands there was a castle, confirmed by a document dated the fifteenth of March in the year one thousand; or ars aeris, the art of copper, since two or three hammer-mills worked here; or again, according to Giovanni da Schio, the Etruscan particle arse, which occurs in the formula arse verse, «guard against fire», and which he found in many place names situated on the borders of territories, as though they were ancient guard posts. Fire, in any case, did not remain a metaphor: in December 1643 a great blaze destroyed many houses in the town, whose roofs were then largely of straw.

At the end of the thirteenth century the first known member of the Thiene family was born here, one Vincenzo son of the late Tealdino, who in his own will declared without circumlocution the trade he followed: he lent money at usury, at Thiene and in the surrounding countryside. Much later the town found itself at the centre of the war. On the eighteenth of May 1916 Arsiero was abandoned, and from the twenty-seventh of May to the twenty-sixth of June the troops of the twentieth Austro-Hungarian army corps occupied it: it was the furthest point the imperial army reached during the Strafexpedition. To take it back, the Italian royal army heavily shelled its own town, and the guns also destroyed the roof of the archpriest's church, which was never rebuilt as it had been. Arsiero became Italian again at the end of June, but the people could only return at the beginning of 1919.