Catania

Catania is an Italian municipality, the capital of the homonymous metropolitan city in Sicily and the heart of an urban agglomeration extended to the south-eastern slopes of Mount Etna.

It is the center of the most densely populated metropolitan area of ??Sicily, and of a larger conurbation known as the linear system of eastern Sicily, which has about 1,700,000 inhabitants on an area of ??2,400 square kilometers.

The city is also the economic and infrastructural hub of the South-East Sicily District, established on February 26, 2014 in the presence of the then President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano.

It is the most populated municipality in Italy that is not the regional capital.

Main industrial, logistic and commercial center of Sicily, it is the seat of Vincenzo Bellini Airport. Founded in 729 BC from the Calcidesi of nearby Naxos, the city boasts a thousand-year history characterized by various dominations whose remains enrich its artistic, architectural and cultural heritage.

Under the Aragonese dynasty it was the capital of the Kingdom of Sicily and since 1434 at the behest of King Alfonso V it is the seat of the oldest university on the island.

In the course of its history it has been repeatedly affected by volcanic eruptions (the most impressive, in historical times, is that of 1669) and by earthquakes (the most catastrophic mentioned were those of 1169 and 1693).

Catania was the native or adoptive homeland of some of the most famous artists and writers of Italy, including composers Vincenzo Bellini and Giovanni Pacini and writers Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Federico De Roberto, Nino Martoglio, Vitaliano Brancati .

The baroque of its historic center was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, together with that of seven municipalities of the Val di Noto (Caltagirone, Militello in Val di Catania, Modica, Noto, Palazzolo Acreide, Ragusa and Scicli), in 2002 .

Map: Catania