Sorgono, Church of San Mauro

The site of the San Mauro countryside sanctuary in Sorgono is on the Mandrolisai hills, 700 m above sea level, on the slopes of Gennargentu. The area represents the geographical center of the island and is an active agricultural and holiday center, in a suggestive natural landscape, 60% covered by woods and rich in springs. There is no lack of evidence of antiquity: nuragic sites abound and there is a strong concentration of tombs of giants, domus de janas and menhirs.
The church is part of an architectural complex consisting of an aggregation of terraced houses with one and two rooms, which take the name of 'cumbessias' or 'muristenes', used as accommodation for pilgrims on the occasion of the festival in honor of Saint Mauro. They are arranged in an irregular quadrangle pattern, giving rise, with the church, to a village that lies on a wide valley at the foot of Mount Lisai.
During the restoration of the eighties of the last century, elements emerged that made it possible to precisely date the church of San Mauro di Sorgono to 1574. Both for formal comparisons and for the acquisition of new documentary sources, it is possible to assign the design authorship of the building, for the strictly manneristic parts, to Giorgio Palearo Fratino, a military engineer assigned to the royal works and the fortifications of Sardinia under Philip II of Spain. The building is located in the wake of those erected between the end of the sixteenth century and the third quarter of the seventeenth century in Nughedu Santa Vittoria, Ardauli, Gavoi and Atzara.
The church repeats the Catalan floor plan of the single barrel-vaulted room with a raised quadrangular presbytery, crossed by a projecting ledge and closed by a vulcanite balustraded enclosure. The inner space of the classroom is punctuated by pilasters in gray vulcanite interspersed with late-Renaissance altar stands. The pilasters are used to hold the underarches of the vault and are marked on the outside by a sequence of sturdy buttresses.
The floor-ended façade is marked on the sides by two oblique buttresses, devoid of real static functionality; in the center, a classically lunected portal opens, derived from Palladian models such as the internal newsstands. The façade is preceded by a staircase flanked by masonry wings at the top of which are two lionine heads holding shields of Aragon.
The rose window opens above the portal with a diameter of 4.5 m and appears to be the largest of the Sardinian specimens. Other examples are known in the parish churches of Neoneli, Atzara, Gavoi and others, all from the 16th and 17th centuries, but although similar in decorative elements, they do not reach 1.5 m in diameter. It is written in a circle consisting of 14 columns, surmounted by a small capital carved on three faces, which start from a circular element, perforated in a cross, and are connected with round arches crossed and variously shaped. The rose window, although inserted in a context in which Gothic-Hispanic and late Renaissance languages coexist synthetically, seems to be affected by ways deriving from southern Italy.

Bibliography by
R. Serra, -G. Cavallo, “The Sanctuary of S. Mauro in Sorgono (Nuoro)”, in Studi Sardi, XXIII, 1975;
G. Cavallo, “The rose window of S. Mauro di Sorgono and its restoration”, in Proceedings of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Cagliari, 15 bis, year IX, n. 1, December 1980;
F. Segni Pulvirenti - A. Sari, Late Gothic and Renaissance Architecture. Nuoro, Ilisso, 1994, sheet 74.

How to get there It is
located about 5 km from the town of Sorgono, on the road to Ortueri.