Porto Rotondo: a Venetian town for VIPs 0 Comments

Porto Rotondo: a Venetian town for VIPs

Only 13 km from Golfo Aranci, Porto Rotondo, under the municipality of Olbia, is with Porto Cervo a famous reality of Sardinian tourism for its summer attendance of Italian and international high society.

In 1964 the Venetian patricians Luigi and Nicolò Donà dalle Rose, founders of the Porto Rotondo Consortium, launched the starting structure of residences and villas, which welcome from 20,000 to 32,000 guests in summer, while the residents for the rest of the year are just a thousand. The “portorotondina” ('Porto Rotondo style') architecture recopies Venice, and the main square is called Piazzetta San Marco. The Yacht Club of Porto Rotondo is one of the most important in Italy, hosting at the end of August the Big Game, considered to be one of the most important sporting fishing events in the Mediterranean.

The Church of San Lorenzo in Porto Rotondo is designed by sculptor Andrea Cascella, while the interior, in Russian pine wood with the shape of a ship's overturned hull, is the project of Mario Ceroli. Groups of Universal Judgment, Deposition, Last Supper and Escape in Egypt, emerge from wood bundles, together with a Tree of Life and a Group of the Donà Dalle Rose family members. A rainbow and a starry sky create rooftops to children playing. A rose window displays glass profiles from Murano and the portal is made of sloping thin slabs. The pavement behind the Church contains profiles cut into slabs of polychrome marbles of the last six Popes and of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Always considered a nuraghe, it was recently discovered that, instead, it is an archaeological unicum: the Torre di Avvistamento Punica (Punic watchtower) of Porto Rotondo, built in the Punic age (400/300 BC), is actually a watchtower of dangers from the sea, defined by the experts "A unique and unparalleled monument in the entire western Mediterranean basin".

The Venetian Count, Luigi Donà dalle Rose, says: "Porto Rotondo is validated by artists such as Ceroli, Cascella, Sangregorio, Chapelain. Coming to Sardinia means wanting to visit it because it has something more than other places: it has extraordinary works. The Church of San Lorenzo is, in my opinion, the most beautiful sculpture made in Italy in the last 100 years. Every year 20 thousand visitors come, but we will reach 100 thousand a year", and we allow ourselves to add, referring to the Tower, that even in the Punic age the inhabitants of the area already knew what they were doing!

You can easily arrange a visit to Porto Rotondo and the other wonders of Costa Smeralda: the Gabbiano Azzurro Hotel & Suites' Concierge service will help you find the best solutions to organize a memorable tour.

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Written by Daniela Toti

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