Most prehistoric tombs in Sardinia sit out in the countryside behind a gate and a dirt track. The domus de janas of Orto del Beneficio Parrocchiale are different: they are in Sennori itself, a few steps from the houses, carved into the soft limestone in what was once, as the name suggests, a garden belonging to the parish. A handful of chambers opens out of the rock, small rooms with low doorways, the work of Neolithic farmers who lived on this ridge thousands of years before anyone thought of building a church here.
Sennori and its neighbour Sorso sit on a balcony of hills just north of Sassari, looking across the Gulf of Asinara to the sea. The district is called the Romangia, and it is wine country. The sweet Moscato di Sorso-Sennori is the local speciality, along with robust reds from the surrounding vineyards, and the slopes falling toward the coast are striped with vines and olive groves. In late afternoon the light comes in low off the water and turns the stone of the villages honey-coloured.
The riding around here is relaxed rather than dramatic. From Sennori the road drops through bends to Sorso and on to the long sandy beach at Platamona, which fills with locals on summer weekends. Head east along the coast instead and you reach Castelsardo, a fortified old town stacked on a rock above the sea, with a castle at the top and women weaving baskets from dwarf palm in the doorways. The inland roads toward Osilo and the Anglona are quieter and more twisting, with good views back over the gulf.
Sennori is a town of nearly seven thousand people, so fuel, bars and small shops are all close at hand, and Sassari, eight kilometres away, has everything a traveller might need, including bigger workshops if the bike needs attention. Sassari has a reputation for its own food culture too: try fainè, a thin chickpea flatbread brought over by Ligurian traders, or a plate of snails in the autumn.
The tombs make a natural pairing with the larger necropolis of Anghelu Ruju near Alghero, which is on the same ride and gives you a sense of how widespread this way of burying the dead once was across the north-west of the island. Here, though, the charm is in the closeness: a prehistoric cemetery and a modern village sharing the same hillside, with nobody making a fuss about it.