Catania has been destroyed and rebuilt at least seven times. Beneath the black Baroque streets lie Roman theatres, imperial baths and Norman walls swallowed by the 1669 lava flow and the 1693 earthquake. Three days tracing what survived.
A 7,000-seat Roman theatre on Greek foundations, half-buried under 18th-century houses and lava. Marble seating, flooded lower galleries and the small Odeon rehearsal hall behind. Open 09:00–19:00, last entry 18:30.
A 2nd-century Roman bath hall converted into a Byzantine church, then a Norman one, then bombed in 1943. The dome still shows Christian frescoes over Roman brickwork — four eras stacked in one room.
Frederick II's square keep of 1239–1250 once stood on a sea cliff; the 1669 Etna eruption filled the harbour and left it a kilometre inland. Inside, the Museo Civico holds the Biscari classical collection and Sicilian painting.
Only a fraction is exposed in the sunken piazza, but the full 2nd-century amphitheatre held around 15,000 — second in Sicily only to Syracuse. Prince Biscari excavated it in the 1740s; the rest still runs under Via Etnea.
Europe's second-largest Benedictine complex, UNESCO-listed, rebuilt after 1693 on top of the 1669 lava flow — you can walk on the black rock inside the basement. Now the university humanities faculty.
Sicily's largest church, abandoned unfinished in 1796 — the facade still shows raw truncated columns. A brass meridian line of 1841 crosses the transept floor, marked with zodiac signs for solar noon readings.
Housed in the Ciminiere former sulphur works, it reconstructs Operation Husky: a 1943 Sicilian square before and after bombing, walked through inside a simulated air raid. Catania fell to the Allies on 5 August 1943.
Stretches of the 1541 Spanish bastion walls survive near Porta Garibaldi, the black-and-white lava arch raised in 1768. The 1669 lava overran these defences and hardened against them — the flow front is still readable.
Two hundred metres containing four 18th-century churches and the Arco di San Benedetto, thrown across the street in a single night in 1704 to beat a court injunction. The UNESCO core of Vaccarini's rebuilt city.
The fourth-floor apartment on Via Sant'Anna where the founder of Italian verismo lived and died in 1922. His library of 2,600 volumes, writing desk and the bedroom left as it was when he suffered his fatal stroke.
The cathedral's treasury holds the silver reliquary vara paraded for Sant'Agata each February. From the courtyard a stair drops into the Terme Achilliane, 4th-century Roman baths running under Piazza del Duomo.
In 1958 the city razed most of San Berillo and displaced 30,000 residents for a boulevard never finished. What remains is a grid of half-demolished lanes, murals and Sicily's oldest surviving red-light quarter.