Catania Cathedral

The church of San Placido dates back to 1409, the year in which the as yet unbuilt site was donated to Benedictine nuns. The construction took place on the ruins of an ancient pagan temple dedicated to the god Bacchus. The church was razed to the ground by the catastrophic earthquake in the Val di Noto in 1693, which destroyed the city of Catania. The new church was built just afterwards and was consecrated in 1723.

The church of San Francesco d'Assisi all'Immacolata is located on the site where the Franciscan order settled in the 13th century. In 1329 the Queen Consort of Sicily Eleanor of Anjou promoted the construction of the primitive convent and church of St. Francis of Assisi all'Immacolata. Destroyed in 1693 by the Val di Noto earthquake, the church had to be rebuilt in the 18th century.

The Church of St. Benedict was built in the 15th century when Benedictine nuns settled on the present site to erect their church. After the Val di Noto earthquake in 1693, the complex was rebuilt from 1704 and completed in 1763 with work on the façade by Giovanni Battista Vaccarini and the interior decoration and fresco painting by Giovanni Tuccari. After the 1943 bombings that hit the building hard, the splendid frescoes painted between 1726 and 1729, largely covered at the end of the 18th century, resurfaced.