Borutta

The name Borutta comes from a cave: the village was once called Gruta, and the cave is really there. It is Sa Rocca Ulari, which opens right below the monastery and which in the late Neolithic was both dwelling and burial place, as the axes, flints, obsidian and human bones found there attest; today a colony of bats of five different species lives in it. Above the cave stood the city of Sorres, a bishop's seat and capital of the curatoria of Meilogu: the Aragonese levelled it, the survivors came down to Borutta, which became the bishop's residence, and in 1503 the diocese was suppressed and united with that of Sassari.

Of the vanished city the cathedral remains. San Pietro di Sorres, built between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in that Pisan Romanesque of light and dark banding that reached Sardinia by sea, has been a national monument since 1894, and since 1950 the church and the adjoining monastery have housed a community of Benedictines. The distinction the village is proudest of, however, is recent: in April 1946 Borutta elected as mayor Ninetta Bartoli, one of the first three women to head an Italian comune, and she held the office for twelve years.