Why I love terrible towns

There are plenty of reasons to visit Catania in Sicily, and some of them are positive. The town is impressively ancient – dating back to the 8th century bc. It boasts a handsome, lavishly voluted Baroque core. A few steps from that main piazza you can find the picturesque fish market, the Pescheria, which sequins the black tufa cobbles with silvery fish scales, and has been selling inky squid for centuries.

What else? The city has a striking location, with Mount Etna squatting on the horizon, apparently benign, but occasionally sending out chuffs of smoke to remind you of its menace, like a volcanic version of Tony Benn, puffing his pipe at the edge of British politics. In the cafés you can eat the breasts of Saint Agatha – that’s a kind of cake, celebrating the breasts torn off a defiant Christian virgin around ad 300 (I’m eating one breast as I write this). Finally, the food is properly good, which supports my long-held belief that the best food in Italy is commonly found in the poorer, less touristy corners.

And there’s the rub. Catania is poor. It is grimy, dusty, sooty, scattered with litter, surrounded by dystopian suburbs, and graffiti is scrawled over graffiti every inch. And it is edgy: by some reckonings it is the most dangerous city in Europe, per capita, certainly in the top ten, thanks to pickpocketing and mugging at the low end of the scale and Mafia grift and murder at the top.

In short, Catania is a terrible town, and that is why I love it. Because this is my guilty travel writer’s secret: show me a poor, benighted, sad, miserable, remote, homicidal, melancholy, weird, inaccessible, hostile, freezing, burning, druggy, or frankly appalling town, and I’ll show you a destination that I can really get behind, even love, for one reason or another.