Monteleone Rocca Doria, Santo Stefano Church

Monteleone Rocca Doria, one of the smallest towns in Sardinia, is perched on the southern coast of a relief of limestone tuff called Su Monte, almost entirely enclosed by the waters of the artificial lake of Alto Temo. The name of the town derives from a fortress built by the powerful Doria family, the “Monte Leonis castrum”, of which we have news in the 14th century. Located in the town, the church of Santo Stefano is the town's parish church.
There is no documentary evidence of the medieval factory, which can be placed between the middle of the 13th century due to its architectural features. The Romanesque church, in limestone ashlars, had a single room, with only one E-shaped apse. In a second phase, it was expanded with the addition of a second, narrower aisle, and a smaller apse. The two naves were covered with wooden trusses, of which only a few shelves are left embedded in the N wall; today the vaults are made of masonry.
The two facades seem to be the result of a reworking of the starting forms: in one, the Romanesque arch seems to have been reused, while in the other, large single-light windows are opened round the corner. Even the apses are different insofar as the N one is set on a rather high base and the mirror is punctuated by pilasters that enclose trumped single-light windows; below the basin, there is a theory of decorated ogival arches that set on peducci. The S apse, on the other hand, has a single trumped monophore surmounted by a series of three-lobed pointed arches set on shelves in the shape of an inverted pyramid.

History of studies
The history of studies on the church of Santo Stefano includes the entry 'Monteleone' by Vittorio Angius, in the Casalis' Dictionary '(1843) and then takes a leap of almost a century with the monograph by Domenico Arru (1980). The monument was included in a repertoire of rural architecture in 1989, edited by Salvatore Pirisinu, while in 1993 it was Roberto Coroneo's card in the volume on Romanesque architecture in Sardinia.

Bibliography
V. Angius, “Monteleone”, in G. Casalis, Historical-Statistical-Commercial Geographical Dictionary of the States by H.M. the King of Sardinia, XI, Turin, G. Maspero, 1843, pp. 192-193, 237;
R. Delogu, The Architecture of the Middle Ages in Sardinia, Rome, The State Library, 1953, pp. 120-121;
D. Arru, Monteleone Roccadoria, Sassari, Dessì, 1980, p. 63; F: Fois, Castles of Medieval Sardinia, edited by B. Fois, Castles of Medieval Sardinia, edited by B. Fois, Castles of Medieval Sardinia Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana, 1992, pp. 279-281; R. Coroneo, Romanesque architecture from the mid-thousand to the early 1300s. Nuoro, Ilisso, 1993, sheet 137;
R. Coroneo, Romanesque Churches of Sardinia. Tourist-cultural itineraries, Cagliari, AV, 2005, p. 4.

How to
get there Take the SS 292 from Pozzomaggiore to Villanova Monteleone, for a few kilometers until you reach the town of Monteleone Rocca Doria, where the church is located.