The City of Black Stone and White Lime
Piazza del Duomo was rebuilt in Sicilian Baroque after the earthquake of 1693, and the whole effect of it comes down to two stones set against each other. The dark one is pietra lavica, quarried straight out of the flows and used for the structural masonry. The pale one is limestone, cut into portals and cornices that catch the southern light. Builders played them off each other deliberately, and the black-and-white streets date from that decision. The square is closed on all sides by eighteenth-century Baroque buildings, which is why it reads as one composition rather than a row of separate facades: everything went up at once, to one idea, out of the same two quarries.
Commanding the centre of the piazza stands the Fontana dell’Elefante, the elephant fountain, designed by the Sicilian Baroque architect Giovanni Battista Vaccarini in the eighteenth century. The elephant is cut from the same black basalt. Catania calls him ‘U Liotru and uses him as the emblem of the city. On his back stands an Egyptian granite obelisk, topped with a globe and a cross.
Facing the square rises the Cattedrale di Sant’Agata, the Cathedral of Saint Agatha, dedicated to the patron saint of Catania. Vaccarini designed the eighteenth-century Baroque facade using carved stone columns and marble statues set over dark volcanic masonry. Behind that facade the building keeps its eleventh-century Norman apses, and the whole thing rests on Roman foundations.
The River Beneath the Stone
The Amenano runs under the central avenues, buried there by seventeenth-century lava. The subterranean current emerges into daylight on the southern flank of Piazza del Duomo at the Fontana dell’Amenano, a fountain sculpted from white Carrara marble by Tito Angelini in the nineteenth century. Water cascades over the sculpted marble basin before draining into underground channels that lead toward the port.
A short walk inland is the Teatro Romano. Its semicircular auditorium was built from the same black basalt blocks, interspersed with Roman brick and faced with marble, and its cávea, the tiered seating, climbs the slope around the orchestra floor where the audience once sat.
The river is still down there. The Amenano runs directly beneath the orchestra and the stage, and the passages under the masonry are full of moving water you can hear before you see it. Next door stands the Odeon, a smaller semicircular theatre of the same volcanic stone, built as a covered hall beside the open one.
The Fortress Surrounded by Lava
South of there stands Castello Ursino, the thirteenth-century fortress built for the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. It is square, severe and made of hardened lava, with thick curtain walls running between four circular corner towers around an open courtyard.
It also keeps the record of what the coast did. Frederick put it on a cliff above the sea, behind a moat. In the seventeenth century, massive lava flows from Mount Etna reached the shoreline. The volcanic rock surrounded the fortress, filled the moat, and pushed the coastline outward into the Ionian Sea.
The castle is landlocked now, in the middle of a residential quarter, and the edge of that lava flow is still legible in the streets around it.
The Basalt Avenue and the Mountain
The central boulevard is Via Etnea, which runs dead straight north from Piazza del Duomo at the cone of Mount Etna. The volcano sits at the end of it like a backdrop that nobody had to build.
Underfoot are the basole laviche, big slabs of lava cut locally. They turn glossy after rain and throw back the evening lights while the whole city walks over them.
Eighteenth-century Baroque palazzi and churches line the avenue, built from the same black stone and carved limestone, with wrought-iron balconies hanging out over the flagstones. Everything about the street points north at the mountain.
The Market Beneath the Arches
Behind Piazza del Duomo and the Amenano fountain is La Pescheria, A’ Piscaria in Sicilian: the fish market. The market extends beneath the vaulted masonry tunnel of the Palazzo dei Chierici, where stone arches funnel cool air across damp flagstones.
Water runs in channels beside the marble slabs. There is swordfish laid out whole, and sardines, anchovies, tuna and shellfish, all of it under red canvas awnings that hold off the midday sun.
Round the edges of the market squares stand the chioschi, open kiosks that serve seltz, limone e sale: soda water, lemon squeezed into it on the spot, and a pinch of coarse sea salt. It is startling the first time and then it becomes the reason to walk back through the market.
The Table of Salted Ricotta and Fried Aubergine
The plate to order is Pasta alla Norma, named after the opera by Vincenzo Bellini, who was born here. Pasta goes into tomato sauce with fried aubergine and basil, and the bowl is finished with ricotta salata grated over the top, salty and dry enough to cut the sweetness of the tomato.
Street food means arancini, and in Catania the word is arancino, masculine, which people elsewhere in Sicily will argue about. They come as cones rather than spheres, shaped to the silhouette of Etna, packed with meat ragù, peas and caciocavallo inside a crisp breadcrumb shell. Pastry shops sell cannoli, fried tubes filled with sweetened sheep’s-milk ricotta and finished with candied peel or crushed pistachios.
With it comes Etna DOC, made from Nerello Mascalese grown on the slopes above the city. The vines sit in volcanic soil, so even the wine comes off the mountain.
Put the pieces side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. The theatre is lava with a river running under it. The castle is lava that later lava cut off from the sea. The cathedral is lava behind a limestone face, the pavement is lava sawn into slabs, the elephant on the fountain is lava, and the wine comes out of ground the mountain made. Etna is not the threat at the edge of this city. It is the material the place is made of, and Catania has never pretended otherwise.
