Catania

The chief wonder of Catania, Sicily's second city, is that it's there at all. Nearly every century has seen its share of tragedy for the Catanesi: a Greek tyrant that cast the population out, another who sold the majority of the citizens into slavery, Carthaginians who drove the successive occupants away once again. Each time, the city was rebuilt, only to meet more destruction. The plague hit hard in the Middle Ages, severely decimating the population. Mount Etna erupted in 1669, with a mile-wide stream of lava covering part of the city, and just 25 years after that, a disastrous earthquake forced Catania to begin again.