An island still being built

Etna's height is a measurement with a date on it, not a number.

The record keeps moving between craters. The North-East Crater held it through the eighties and then lost metres to rim collapse. The South-East Crater took it after some fifty paroxysms beginning in February 2021. In the summer of 2024 the Voragine's eastern rim rose by around a hundred metres in three weeks and took it back. Published figures are quietly corrected afterwards, as the surveys are reworked.

An aerial view of a volcano summit: a deep crater with rust-red layered inner walls, white steam rising from vents along its rim, a dark cone to the right throwing out a brown ash plume, and a twin-peaked cone behind it on the left. Open full screenA wide snow slope under a deep blue sky, black lava outcrops breaking through it. A line of about a dozen walkers with poles crosses the slope in single file. Below them a flat white deck of cloud runs to the horizon. Open full screen

So the durable sentence is that the mountain is re-surveyed after every major sequence. The current record, 3,403 m at the Voragine, is only as good as its September 2024 date — whatever number replaces it will have one too.

In 1669 lava from vents near Nicolosi ran for a hundred and twenty-two days, threw up the Monti Rossi cone on the way, and reached Catania's walls in April. The walls held it about a fortnight before it began climbing over them. It filled the moat of the Castello Ursino and buried the lower ten metres of the building, then pushed the shoreline out some eight hundred metres.

Open full screen

The castle was built on the sea. It now stands inland, and the distance is walkable. That is the eruption's real memorial — not a ruin, but a changed map.

Contemporary accounts record no deaths from the flow itself. The figures of ten and twenty thousand that still circulate were invented later.

Mascali went in 1928, over roughly a day and a half. The evacuation was orderly enough that families took out their furniture and their window frames first. The government rebuilt the town on a grid, and it was finished by 1937.

Ash is the ordinary version, and it is a municipal matter rather than a spectacle. When the summit throws it, the comuni issue an ordinance: speed limits down, two-wheelers off the roads, residents to bag the fall and not hose it into the drains, because it sets. In a single week of August 2026, more than six hundred of Catania's scheduled flights were cancelled.

A squat castle of dark lava blockwork seen from the square below: a massive cylindrical drum tower at the near corner, more round towers set back at either end, narrow slit windows and a small pointed-arch doorway at the base, under a deep blue sky with thin cloud. A clipped hedge and a line of stone bollards run across the foreground, with a handful of people sitting and standing at the left. Open full screenNight. A dark volcano silhouette across the lower frame, a brilliant white-orange vent erupting on the summit ridge and molten orange lava spread down the near flank. A tall ash column rises into the sky, lit red from below and colouring the clouds, with stars showing through. In the foreground a snow slope with a line of small dark trees. Open full screenA bright orange-red lava flow several metres wide running diagonally downhill, its surface a mosaic of glowing cracks and dark cooling crust, edged by rubbly incandescent blocks, cutting through a field of rough black-grey solidified lava. On the ridge above, about ten people in helmets stand watching. Open full screenA night view from a rooftop terrace with a metal railing across the foreground. In the distance a volcano erupts: a bright fountain of lava at the summit, an orange-lit ash plume above it and a thin glowing streak down the flank, the whole sky washed orange. Silhouetted against the glow stand a Baroque church dome with a tall lantern and a second, larger dome beyond it. Open full screen

Volcanic ash weathers into andosol — light, porous, holding water and air at the same time. It makes up about one per cent of the world's land surface, and only ever forms where a volcano has been.

Two things follow. Phylloxera never took hold in the sand, because loose grains will not hold the galleries the insect needs, so ungrafted vines survive on this mountain that died almost everywhere else in Europe. And Etna DOC, granted in 1968 and the first in Sicily, now maps a hundred and forty-two contrade much as Burgundy maps its climats. The vines are alberello, free-standing bushes no machine can work, planted from 450 metres to past a thousand. Lapilli fall on them in summer.

Bronte pistachios are grafted onto wild terebinth, whose roots force down into fissures in the lava. They crop in odd years only; in the even year the flower buds are stripped so the tree rests. Ten years before a graft bears, then two or three centuries of life, and never more than about five metres tall. Every stage is done by hand, because the terraces are too steep and too stony for anything else.

Blood oranges are red for a reason that is local in the strict sense. A jumping stretch of DNA sits beside the gene that switches on the red pigment, and cold nights switch on the jumping stretch. Plant the identical cultivars in Florida or Brazil and the fruit comes up orange.

Two old free-standing bush vines in a row, the nearer one filling the right of the frame: a thick, deeply fissured corkscrew trunk rising straight out of the ground beside a weathered wooden stake, its short arms carrying a dozen heavy bunches of dusty blue-black grapes among green and red-blotched autumn leaves. Open full screenA cluster of ripening pistachio fruit on a branch, the oval husks yellow-green with red-purple tips, surrounded by the tree’s large oval leaves and backlit against a bright sky. Open full screenHalved oranges face-up on a pale wooden board in daylight. One blood orange at the front left has dark red-maroon flesh with a white pith star at the centre and a thin yellow rind; beside it and behind it lie five halves of ordinary orange with bright yellow-orange segments. Open full screen

The Peloritani, the Nebrodi and the Madonie run west from the strait as one chain, mountain for most of the north coast's length. The motorway crosses them on viaducts and through tunnels, because the strip of land below is too narrow to hold it, and villages sit high above their own beaches on roads that switchback down to the water.

Thirty wild Sicilian firs are left. Abies nebrodensis grows on scree in the Madonie, across an area smaller than two square kilometres, and only twenty-four of the thirty set fertile seed. The species was thought extinct until 1957.

The Madonie park holds more than half of all Sicilian plant species. Next door, the Nebrodi carry more than ten thousand hectares of beech above 1,200 metres, at the southern edge of the tree's European range. Only Etna's own beech woods stand further south. Griffon vultures were gone from Sicily by the 1960s; birds brought from Spain bred here again in 2005.

A wide view from a footpath high in a mountain range, looking out over a deep forested valley to hazy blue ridges on the horizon. Dense dark-green woodland covers the near and middle slopes, with a bare-branched tree at the left, low scrub and a stony path across the foreground, and a pale rock outcrop at the right edge. Open full screenA single young fir, dark green and conical, standing on a steep hillside of loose pale limestone scree. A stony track crosses the left foreground, scrubby oak and beech cover the slope, and bare grey-green ridges rise across the valley. Open full screenA griffon vulture banking close to the camera, wings spread right across the frame and both wingtips running out of it, head turned towards the lens. Pale buff body and coverts against dark grey-brown flight feathers, a white ruff at the neck and a pale hooked bill. A white tag lettered in black is clipped to each wing and a thin tracking aerial stands up from its back. Open full screen

The Alcantara gorge is a lava flow that cooled against a river. Basalt cracks perpendicular to whatever surface cools it, so the walls came out as five- and six-sided columns; the river then cut back down through its own obstruction. The local names describe the patterns rather than the physics — catasta, a woodpile; arpa, a harp.

The faraglioni off Aci Trezza are the oldest volcanic rock in the Etna region, erupted underwater around half a million years ago, well before the mountain existed. Homer had Polyphemus throw them at Odysseus.

At Vendicari, lagoons and old salt pans take about a hundred and eighty bird species a year. What makes them matter is the geography: Malta is eighty kilometres south, and after Malta it is another three hundred to Africa.

A close view of a gorge wall of grey basalt columns. A great curved fan of them sweeps up from the lower left, the columns bending as they rise; along the top and right they are cut across so their five- and six-sided ends show as a rough paving of polygons. Dry tufts of plants are rooted in the cracks. Open full screenSea stacks at sunrise seen from the shore: a flat-topped island with a low building on it, a jagged low reef and a tall pointed stack, all in silhouette against a deep orange sky. The sun sits just clear of the horizon at right with its reflection running down still water, and a scatter of moored dinghies lies inshore at left. Open full screenA tall slim brick chimney, the low crenellated stone wall of a tuna works, a whitewashed building, an umbrella pine and a square honey-coloured tower, seen across the water on a bright breezy day. Rows of white-capped waves run across the whole foreground. Open full screen

Two units of geological time are named after one Sicilian city. The Messinian is named for Messina; the Zanclean for Zancle, which is what Messina was called first. The marker defining the base of the Pliocene is driven in at Eraclea Minoa, on the south coast. The white cliff at the Scala dei Turchi is that same Pliocene marl — the shells of plankton, laid down in ninety-six cycles you can count by eye.

This coast faces Africa and shows it: the marl burns white at midday, and the scirocco arrives here first, leaving red dust on the cars and yellowing the light. Away from the water the heat can go further than visitors expect — 48.8°C was recorded at Floridia, near Syracuse, on 11 August 2021, an extreme rather than an ordinary August afternoon.

Open full screen

Stromboli has thrown bombs from its summit at intervals of minutes for as long as anyone has written it down — at least two thousand years, though the rock puts the present pattern nearer twelve hundred. Five hundred people live on it. Sailors called it the lighthouse of the Mediterranean and navigated by it.

The English word volcano comes from the island two along. The Romans took Vulcano for the chimney of the forge.

On Pantelleria the vines sit one to a hand-dug hollow, cut low, below the wind; UNESCO put the practice on its intangible heritage list in 2014. And Lampedusa, administered from Sicily, is not geologically Sicilian at all. It sits on the African shelf — 113 kilometres from Tunisia, 205 from the island that governs it.

The waterfront of a volcanic island seen from the water: a concrete ferry pier jutting into flat blue sea, two blue-and-white fishing boats at its end, a black-pebble shore with small open boats drawn up on it, and white flat-roofed houses climbing a green hillside to a pale domed church on the ridge. Open full screenA deep crater bowl of grey and ochre ash seen from the rim path, its far wall streaked and crusted with sulphur yellow, dark cinder and scattered stones in the foreground, and beyond the rim a low isthmus and two further islands rising across a deep blue sea. Open full screenA vineyard seen from slightly above: long rows of low bush vines, each sitting in its own shallow hand-dug hollow in pale dusty soil so the ground reads as a field of dimples. A single farmer in a blue shirt and sun hat is bent over a hoe between two rows, and a low dry-stone wall of dark volcanic blocks crosses behind the plot. Open full screenA view from a dry limestone cliff-top down over a bay: a low flat-topped rocky islet lying just offshore, a pale sand shore and shallow turquoise water between it and the headland, deep blue open sea to the right, and burnt scrub and thistles in the foreground. Open full screen