Monastero dei Benedettini di San Nicolò l'Arena

Near Catania's cathedral, the Benedictine monastery of San Nicolò l'Arena unfolds in extensive cloisters, courtyards and gardens. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it has been a monastery, barracks and, today, a seat of the University of Catania.

Why it matters

Few buildings anywhere let you read a city's entire biography in one walk. Beneath the monastery are mosaics from a Roman town house; above them rises late-Baroque architecture, part of a complex the regional tourism portal counts among Europe's largest. The corridors remain in use as part of the University of Catania's humanities campus.

What to notice

The complex extends across roughly 210 by 130 metres. Beneath the monastery, excavation revealed a Roman domus with mosaics and a triclinium; a suspended steel walkway crosses the underground spaces. The western Chiostro dei Marmi is the older cloister, with a seventeenth-century fountain, while the eastern cloister opens onto gardens, including the Giardino dei Novizi. The gardens lie on the lava flow of the 1669 eruption. The eighteenth-century kitchens and monumental staircase belong to the monastery's reconstruction. The adjacent church of San Nicolò l'Arena has an unfinished facade, an organ by Donato Del Piano and a meridian line across its transept floor.

Context and history

Benedictine monks displaced from their house near Nicolosi obtained permission to build inside Catania's walls. Work began in 1558, and the monks occupied the still-unfinished monastery in 1578. Etna tested the site at once — the eruption of 1669 licked the cloister and destroyed the church — and the earthquake of 11 January 1693 levelled the monastery and killed most of the community. What rose again over the eighteenth century was grander: reconstruction under Andrea Amato, then Francesco Battaglia, Giovanni Battista Vaccarini and finally Stefano Ittar, who completed the dome in 1780 and framed piazza Dante with its exedra. Suppressed in 1866, the complex passed to civic institutions, housing barracks, schools, the civic museum, the astronomical observatory of Pietro Tacchini and the civic library. Bombed in 1943, it was ceded to the University of Catania in 1977 and restored between 1986 and 2004 under the architect Giancarlo De Carlo, whose intervention adapted the monastery into the seat of the humanities department without erasing its layers. In 2002 the monastery joined the UNESCO World Heritage List alongside Catania, under the serial designation "Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto".