Sorgono

The exact geographic centre of Sardinia is in this comune, and that is not a figure of speech: it is a precise point, in open country a little outside the village, inside a cork wood, marked by a menhir that stands beneath the crown of a monumental cork oak; the Region protects the whole of it as natural and cultural heritage. Sorgono is the historic district capital of the Mandrolisai, and to this day it holds the services for the whole area, hospital and tax office included. The territory is full of prehistory: dozens of nuraghi, giants' tombs, domus de janas and above all the menhirs of Biru 'e Concas. The Romans, in the long course of their rule over the island, managed only with difficulty to penetrate this inner heart, and the Sardinian people kept an autonomy of their own for a long time.

That autonomy, later on, even took a written form. In 1507 Sorgono obtained, together with the other villages of the incontrada of the Mandrolisai, a privilege worth more than a title: to be administered by royal officials born in the place and chosen by election. Every year the inhabitants presented a list of three names, and the king of Aragon had to pick from it. It lasted two centuries, until the island passed to the Habsburgs: in 1711 the territory was again subjected to feudal bond, the inhabitants opposed it and did not manage to shake it off, and the village ended up in the county of San Martino, fief of the Valentino, until the redemption of 1839. Not far off there was another village, Spasulè, which emptied at the beginning of the eighteenth century: many of its people went off to Tonara, and for that reason it was for a long time the parish priests of Tonara who came to say mass in its country church of San Giacomo. At the sanctuary of San Mauro, one of the largest country sanctuaries in Sardinia, the little lodgings built around the church for the pilgrims served instead as a lazaretto during the plague of the mid-seventeenth century.