ROME, ITALY -- St. Cloud won big this week at the International Awards for Livable Communities.

Mayor Dave Kleis was in Rome this week representing the city. He says we won a gold medal for cities our size in the whole city category.

We won the overall gold 1st place for our city population, they bumped us into a little bigger population because of our daytime population, so cities between 75,000 and 150,000, and we won first in that.

The cities we beat out were from Tartu, Estonia, Jiangshan, China, and Douz, Tunisia.

St. Cloud also won gold medals in three of the six categories overall: preservation of heritage, arts and landscape, enhancing the landscape, and community engagement.

Kleis says attending the awards this week in Rome gave him the opportunity to learn best practices from other cities around the world.

St. Cloud was the only American city at this year's awards, which cities have to be invited to apply for.