Every design for Catania

In the Teatro Greco Romano, stone seats still curve around a stage in the middle of the old town, and beyond the rooftops Mount Etna sends up its plume. Catania was founded by Chalcidian Greeks in the eighth century BC and has spent its whole life bargaining with the volcano and the ground beneath it: an earthquake nearly destroyed it in 1169, a lava flow almost swamped it in 1669, and another earthquake devastated it in 1693.

Out of that last disaster came the city the Catanesi know today, exuberant late-Baroque streets built in a black-lava landscape and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the city of Vincenzo Bellini and Giovanni Verga, whose home is now the Casa Museo Giovanni Verga, and of Sicily's first university. It is also the island's busy commercial centre, with its main airport and its most densely populated conurbation, all crowded between the mountain and the Ionian Sea.

If you come from here, you know what it means to see Etna on the horizon every morning. Take it with you: the Castello Ursino, the Fontana dei Sette Canali, the old streets around the Duomo, and the stubborn pride of a city that always rebuilds.