Catania: The Elephant & The Bad Baby

Catania is Sicily’s second city, and hosts the large airport that tourists use to access the smaller but more famous resorts up and down the Greek-flavoured east coast, like Siracusa or Taormina. As with Amalfi Coast or Cinque Terre fans snubbing Naples and Genoa, it probably gets a raw deal. I didn’t expect much from Catania, but thought we might as well make time to see the city if we were flying out of it. And as it turned out, I liked it rather a lot and was sorry not to have a few days here. It’s a university town and feels a bit younger, more energetic, more literate, more left-wing; a place where ideas are transmitted, a place with a robust sense of humour. The city is not overrun with tourism, and perhaps as a consequence the people were the friendliest we met in Sicily. It is quite like our beloved Naples in its mix of Baroque grandiosity and extreme scruffiness; filthy and frayed it may be but the city feels like a living entity, not a mausoleum.