Porto Torres
Porto Torres ( Sardinian Portu Torres, in the local dialect Pòlthu Torra ) is a city in Sardinia in the province of Sassari. It has 22 379 inhabitants ( 31 December 2012) and an area of 102.62 km ².
Porto Torres is on the Gulf of Asinara, across from the island, which belongs to the municipality and is now a National Park. Not far from the port lies the Monte Accoddi. The city is an important port for trade in goods and passenger traffic with Genoa, Toulon and Marseille. There are also seasonal connections to Propriano in Corsica and the Italian port of Civitavecchia and Barcelona in Spain.
Today's autonomous municipality of Porto Torres ( so since the Middle Ages the name) founded in 1842 by the merger of the settlement belt at the port with the former city of Torres. Settled was the region since the Neolithic, the historical rise began at the time of Romanization Sardiens as Augustan colony Turris Libyssonis from which still have received the remains of the baths and the burial ground. Since the early Middle Ages the town was the capital of one of the four Sardinian Giudicati, but since the 12th century it became less important compared with the present provincial capital of Sassari, which served the threatened from the sea by Arab attacks inhabitants of Torres as a retreat.
The former Cathedral (now Basilica ) and Porto Torres, San Gavino, was established since 1065 by Pisan architects in the Romanesque style, on the site of a Byzantine previous building and on the territory of the former Roman necropolis, and was in the 12th century, its present size shape with a closed respectively by apses in the east and west nave. It is the largest Romanesque church in Sardinia and probably the starting point for the medieval, literary in Latin literature tangible since the early 12th century cult of the saint Gabinus or Gavinus in Sardinia, a martyr from the Roman period († 303? ), The there with two other local saints, Protus and Januarius, is to be buried, and whose life and martyrdom subject of the oldest surviving literary text in the Sardinian language ( Sat vitta et sa morte, et passione de sanctu Gavinu, Prothu et Januariu, mid 15th century )