Catania keeps rebuilding itself in black lava at the foot of Etna
Sicily's second city sits at the base of Mount Etna, one of the world's active volcanoes, and has paid for it. An earthquake nearly erased Catania in 1169, lava almost engulfed it in 1669, and another quake wrecked it in 1693. Each time it rebuilt, and its late-baroque old town is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Greek settlers from nearby Naxos founded the colony of Katane around 729 BC, taking over a village of the native Sicels. The name may come from a Sicel word for a grater or a rough, sharp place, fitting for a city repeatedly rebuilt on jagged lava. Arab rulers around 900 called it the City of the Elephant, probably after an ancient lava sculpture of an elephant that still stands over the fountain in Piazza Duomo and was prized as a talisman against enemies and disasters.
The Greek city was a centre of learning. The lawgiver Charondas was born there, the poet Stesichorus is said to have been buried outside one of its gates, and the philosopher Xenophanes spent his final years there. Local legend told of two brothers, Amphinomos and Anapias, who fled an eruption carrying their elderly parents while the lava parted around them; the city put them on its coins. Life was turbulent: in 476 BC the Syracusan tyrant Hieron expelled the whole population, renamed the city Aetna and brought in settlers, and the original citizens only returned in 461 BC. In 415 BC it served as headquarters for the Athenian expedition against Syracuse.
Rome took Catania in 263 BC during the First Punic War and carried off a sundial as booty. A massive eruption in 121 BC buried much of the city under lava and ash heavy enough to cave in roofs, and Rome excused it from tribute for 10 years. Augustus later made it a colony, and its aqueduct, at 24 kilometres, was the longest in Roman Sicily.
Catania later flourished as a cultural centre, founding Sicily's first university in 1434, and gave Italy the composer Vincenzo Bellini and the novelist Giovanni Verga. Today, with 296,984 residents in the city proper, it is the island's industrial and commercial hub, with the largest airport in southern Italy.
Source: Catania
