Editing Catania (section)

===Unified Italy===
Catania was one of the vanguards of the movement for Sicilian autonomy in the early 19th century.

In 1860 [[Giuseppe Garibaldi]]'s [[expedition of the Thousand]] conquered [[Sicily]] for Piedmont from the [[Kingdom of the Two Sicilies]]. Since the following year Catania was part of the newly [[unification of Italy|unified Italy]], whose history it shares since then.

The first half of the twentieth century was a cycle of repeated destruction and rebuilding for the city of Catania.

During the years 1923 and 1928, Catania endured two major eruptions of Mt. Etna. The 1923 eruption lasted twenty-nine days, from June 6 until June 29. A large lava flow occurred in the 1928 event and was the first to destroy a population center in over two hundred years.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Ponte |first=Gaetano |title=The Recent Eruption of Etna |publisher=Nature |year=1923 |edition=112 |pages=546–548}}</ref>

At the onset of World War 1, Italy was part of a defensive alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary referred to as the Triple Alliance.  After one year, Italy joined the Allied forces. Many promises made to secure Italy’s help during the war were not kept resulting in stability issues throughout the country leading to the adoption of fascist ideations.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Pryce |first=Roy |title=Italy and the Outbreak of the First World War |publisher=Cambridge Historical Journal |year=1954 |pages=219–227}}</ref> As the second World War began, the new regime opted to support Adolf Hitler, resulting in Catania and all the surrounding areas on Sicily being destroyed by Allied bombing.

{{anchor|Allied air attacks}} During [[World War II]], Catania was heavily bombed by the Allied air forces, owing to the presence of two of the main Axis airfields in Sicily ([[Gerbini Airfield|Gerbini]] and [[Catania-Fontanarossa Airport|Fontanarossa]]) and for its strategically important port and [[marshalling yard]]. Altogether, the city suffered eighty-seven air raids. The heaviest took place in the spring and summer of 1943, before and during the [[Allied invasion of Sicily]]; they caused heavy damage to the city (among others, twenty-eight churches and most historic palaces suffered damage), killed 750 inhabitants and prompted most of the population to flee to the countryside.<ref>[http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/catania_res-6c14df7d-87e5-11dc-8e9d-0016357eee51_%28Enciclopedia-Italiana%29/ Enciclopedia Treccani]</ref><ref>[http://bombesullitalia.blogspot.com/2019/04/bombardamenti-di-catania.html Bombardamenti di Catania]</ref><ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20140202213215/http://rcslibri.corriere.it/bombardatelitalia/bombardate1943.pdf Bombardate l'Italia: 1943]</ref><ref>[http://anpi-lissone.over-blog.com/article-i-bombardamenti-aerei-nel-mezzogiorno-d-italia-60089978.html I bombardamenti aerei nel Mezzogiorno d'Italia]</ref> After heavy fighting across eastern Sicily, Catania was eventually captured by the [[British 8th Army]] on 5 August 1943.<ref>The Invasion of Sicily 1943 By Jon Diamond, pp. 212–214</ref>

After the conflict, and the constitution of the [[Italy|Italian Republic]] (1946), Catania attempted to catch up with the economic and social development of Italy's richer northern regions. The problems faced in Catania were emblematic of those faced by other towns in the [[Southern Italy|Mezzogiorno]], namely a heavy gap in industrial development and infrastructures, and the threat of [[Sicilian Mafia|the mafia]]. This notwithstanding, during the 1960s (and partly during the 1990s) Catania enjoyed development and a period of economic, social, and cultural success. In the first decade of the 21st century, Catania's economic and social development somewhat faltered and the city is again facing economic and social stagnation. This was aggravated by the economic crisis left by the {{Lang|it|[[Forza Italia]]|italic=no}} administration of mayor Scapagnini in 2008.<ref>[http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-6b76e15d-a80b-465e-9531-131a194e030b.html?p=0 Documentary about the conditions of the city after the financial turmoil] {{in lang|it}}</ref>