Orosei, Church of San Giacomo Maggiore

The monument is located on an outcrop of granite rock (984 m above sea level) with extensive domination over the plain of Pratobello.
The parish church of Orosei is considered one of the most suggestive architectural achievements on the island and fully meets, with eighteenth-century grace, the urban furniture needs to which Baroque architects aspired.
The church has been known since the 14th century, but its current structure is the result of the expansion work started during the 17th century and completed in 1794 when Ignazio Masala of Orosei was rector.
In San Giacomo Maggiore, the meeting point of an updated architectural and aesthetic education with a dignified pre-existing construction situation is manifested in the solution, perhaps unique, of building, using a daring scenographic device, a façade on the side of the wall and in the articulation around the dome of the cruise of a series of presbyterial chapels, also domed. Precisely the spread of domes in Sardinia can be considered as a real change in the autochthonous taste that took shape in the 18th century and concerns many sacred buildings in all areas of the island.
Inside, despite the changes in perspective that affect, without his knowledge, the visitor who enters the church from the side of the wall experiencing a sort of loss, a sort of miraculous spatial fusion originates thanks to the multiplication of the domed environments in the presbytery area.
The façade, which overall seems to recall the schematism of a wooden ancona, is architecturally divided by a sturdy and projecting marcapian frame into two orders: the upper one is crowned by a triangular tympanum and is connected to the one below by means of two volutes.
The linear and white surface of the façade is contrasted, on the d., by the bustling group of domes - all covered with terracotta tiles - and the soaring and dry bell tower.

History of studies
The church is the subject of a brief summary in Salvatore Naitza's volume on late seventeenth-century and purist architecture (1992).

Bibliography
V. Mossa, From Gothic to Baroque in Sardinia, Sassari, Carlo Delfino, 1982;
S. Naitza, Architecture from the late 17th century to purist classicism. Nuoro, Ilisso, 1992, sheet 33.