Each morning from my Taormina hotel balcony I would check on Mount Etna, Europe’s highest and most active volcano. November 6 it was venting and with the season’s first traces of snow.
.jpeg)
Etna's height changes after eruptions, most recently in August, but is around 3,350 meters (10,991 feet).
Classical authors, among them Hesiod, Pindar and Virgil, made Etna where the Cyclops toiled for Hephaestus, god of fire. John Dryden the younger (1667/68 - 1701) wrote that Etna was ‘famous from all antiquity for its vomiting up fire’.
The volcano dominates, both in size and occasional fury, a considerable part of eastern Sicily. Here, Etna looms above Catania 46 kilometres (nearly 29 miles) southwest of Taormina.
.jpeg)
In 1669 Etna’s most destructive eruption (at least in recorded history), meant lava flows reaching Catania, destroying parts and forcing many to escape.
.jpeg)
On one side of the city - as in the print - lava reached the sea and came close to a Benedictine monastery, where, 350 or so years later, it can easily be seen.
.jpeg)
The latter part of the 17th Century wasn’t particularly happy for Catania. In 1693 an earthquake virtually destroyed the city. 12,000 or so may have died. After the quake Catania was rebuilt, largely from basalt, that is, lava from Etna.
In the city’s main square, the Piazza Duomo, a café lovers paradise …
.jpeg)
… is a fountain surmounted by a splendid 18th Century elephant - u Liotru - made of lava, which is the city’s symbol.
%20elephant%20and%20pigeon%20(crop%20&%20edit).jpeg)
%20elephant%20(crop%20&%20edit).jpeg)
Etna was visited far less (at least by foreigners) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than the more easily accessible Vesuvius. However, during the Romantic period, the volcano was subject of many paintings and and also in umpteen works of prose and verse.
,%20Die%20eruption%20des%20A%CC%88tna%20(18th%20century),%20oil%20on%20canvas.jpeg)
Here it is about 1840 smouldering over Catania.
As for my time on Sicily, the only eruptions I saw were on advertisements for olive oil …
.jpeg)
… and postcards.
.jpeg)
But I wanted to at least say I’d been on Etna. So, by bus to Mount Etna’s Sapienza Refuge, a sort of base camp first created under Fascism.
.jpeg)
At the refuge, about 1,900 metres up, 8° C, quite bearable with scarf and decent jacket. Also foggy, somehow adding to the impressively eerie quality of the many long extinct craters with hardscrabble remerging vegetation.
.jpeg)
Possible to go further up, but this is enough with so much cloud.
%20(1).jpeg)
.jpeg)
Wandered about a couple of hours, inspected craters …
%20(2).jpeg)
… collected rocks for the seven year old son of friends and took a selfie.
.jpeg)
Time for lunch.
