Around 900 AD, the Saracenic Dominance gave rise to Balad-Al-Fil and Medinat-Al-Fil, the two official Catania's Arabic appellatives. The first translates "The Village or The Country of the Elephant" and the second is simply and proudly "The City of the Elephant".[5] The Elephant is the lavic one of Piazza Duomo’s Fountain, probably just a prehistorical sculpture reforged in Byzantine Era, an idolatrised talisman that was reputed capable to protect the city from any sort of enemies and powerful enough to keep away misfortune, plagues or natural calamities. The Moslem Conquerors accepted this pachydermical protection deciding to name after it the vanquished town. Today's name stems from an Arab toponym. Qatanyiah are literally "the leguminous plants" (in Arab "Qataniyy"), whose feminized collective suffix is "yiah".[6] Pulses like lentils, beans, peas, broad beans and lupins were chiefly cultivated in the Catanian Plain before the arrival of Aghlabites' soldiery from Tunisia. Afterwards, many Islamic Agronomists will be the principal boosters and those who overcropped the citruses orchards in the greater part of Sicily's ploughlands. Lastly, Wadi Musa intends the River or the Valley of Moses that is to say the sometime Arab name of the Symaethus River, but this denomination was rarely associated to pinpoint the seat of the then Emirate of Catania.[6][7][8]Around 263 BC, the Etnean Decuman City was far-famed as Catina and Catana. The former has been primarily utilized for a supposed assonance with "catina", namely the Latin feminization of the vocable "catinus".[4] Catinus hides, in fact, two main values: "a gulf, a basin, a bay" and "a bowl, a vessel, a trough". Both explications may be admissible thanks to the city’s distinctive trait and topography. Catania has constantly abutted on the waters of its vast homonymous Gulf, and besides she has always been reconstructed without having to fear of growing on the blackish asperities of the acuminate slopes of Etna.
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