Catania Part II

All the guidebooks about Sicily devote at least a paragraph to Catania’s pescheria, or fish market, which lies just around the corner from the Duomo.  It’s an awesome experience, that’s for sure, to enter so suddenly such a dark and unusual place, for underneath the dank railway arches and stripy canopies is a world absolutely teeming with activity.  If you want to bag a denison of the deep, this must be one of the greatest places to do it, for caught straight off the Catanian coast is every type of edible sea creature, from baskets of crabs to huge swordfish, sliced thickly and to order.  The market also offers fantastic displays of fruit and vegetables, as well as cups of snails (apparently a popular dish in Sicily.)  Surely the busiest part of the city, locals and tourists alike mingle in the narrows, haggling with stallholders, and jostling to make way for the frequent scooters and motorbikes that slip, wasp-like, through the crowds.  An intense, real, unsanitised life pervades here, and I think the pescheria may be the best embodiment of the city.

Catania's fish market

If you’re able to escape the fish market (and we do, albeit with a punnet of unfortunately sour nectarines), you could almost walk straight in to Castello Ursino.  The fortification was built in the 1200s as a royal castle of Emperor Frederick II, the King of Sicily, to show the population who was boss, and during the devastating earthquake of 1693, the castle was one of the few buildings to remain standing.  Its position is somewhat unusual, being the centrepiece of a fairly attractive piazza, but this does not tell the whole story.  Castello Ursino once looked out over a cliff onto the sea, but following a series of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, it now sits nearly a mile inland.  Inside, the dark museum gives a hint at a once-miserable lifestyle, the prison / torture tower a particular low point.

Castello Ursino

Catania is actually a very interesting city, if you pick-and-choose your areas, and the United Nations agree – the city centre makes up part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto (essentially a collection of Baroque town centres across the Southeast corner of the island.)  To see the whole city centre on foot in a day is just about possible, but to get a better overview (and because we are both dead-on-our-feet) we hunt down a rather touristy alternative and climb aboard the bright red sight-seeing road train which, for five euros, gives you a 45-minute overview of the city.  It’s also an exhilarating way to experience Catanian traffic at its best – that is, lawless – and it soon becomes apparent that the horn on Sicilian models are attached simultaneously to both accelerator and brake.  I find Sicilian drivers curious – they drive too fast, they don’t indicate, they beep incessantly, but there’s never any trace of anger, aggression or urgency in their faces.  In fact, far more people stop to let you cross a road here than would ever do in London, Birmingham or Bristol.  The roads of Catania are chaotic – frighteningly so – but it tends to work in a way it wouldn’t back home, because Catanians drive with a lackadaisical, give-a-shrug attitude that this part of the world is renowned for.  It’s that same attitude which ensures the busses never run on time, trains simply don’t turn up, and street signs are unreliable, but if you can shift your mind-set to their way of thinking, you’d fit in quite nicely.  There’s only one small problem with that – I can’t.

The oh-so-touristy road train

Back in the evening, we take it easy on the hotel’s roof terrace, commanding views over the surrounding roof tops.  The roof terrace is a great place to be – we have all the sounds of the city, a beautiful view looking as far as the coast, but nobody in Catania has any idea we are here.  Up above, swifts are amassed here in their hundreds, their calls filling the air all evening long, giving us a free show of nature in the very centre of this black old city, whilst in the distance, tomorrow’s destination reminds us, with a pale waft of smoke, who’s really in charge around here.

Our hotel roof terrace at night