Dolianova has a cathedral without a city. The church of San Pantaleo is Romanesque-Pisan, begun in 1160 and finished in 1289, and it is one of the best preserved and most imposing examples of the whole Sardinian Romanesque heritage; it is built of sandstone, a stone that lets itself be carved into the most complicated motifs and that for this very reason wears away. Inside there is a baptismal font of the immersion type, sure proof that a place of early Christian worship already stood here. The place was called Dolia and it was a bishop's see: the first document is of 1089, when bishop Virgilio signed the foundation of two monasteries willed by the judge of Cagliari. The diocese was suppressed in 1503 and absorbed by Cagliari, and today that name survives only as a titular see.
The present municipality, instead, was born on 25 June 1905 from the fusion of two villages, Sicci San Biagio and San Pantaleo, which for centuries had had different masters: San Pantaleo a fief of the bishops, Sicci a barony granted in 1355 to Raimondo de Amburra. When they united, the shared services were placed exactly along the old boundary between the two settlements, so that neither could claim them: the schools, the town hall, the council chamber, which still today sits in the rooms of the old municipality of Sicci. And the town kept both its patron saints, San Biagio and San Pantaleo, each with its own feast in August.
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Near Dolianova
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