Do You Think it Might Erupt Today?

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Issy decides to pass on today's scheduled visit to Mount Etna so that she can do some relaxing. I retrieve our trusty little Fiat 500 from the garage. It seems to be taking a long time to appear, and when it finally does it's a bit hard not to notice the multitude of hand prints on the bonnet and boot from being pushed into and out of its tiny parking spot.

I turn off the motorway near Catania and start to climb the constantly smoking mountain. It's a sunny day, but very hazy. The road's very windy and climbs through a landscape of black volcanic rock, interspersed with the occasional valley of trees. It's a bit hard not to notice a series of concrete block walls with past lava flows seemingly dammed up behind them, and an abandoned house completely surrounded by lava piled halfway up its walls. I hope the residents escaped. The vegetation runs out, and the landscape's now made up entirely of piles of black volcanic rock.

The road ends at Refugio Sapienza, and it seems that if I want to climb further I'll need to do so via a cable car. I share a gondola with a young couple from New York City. It's also their first time to Etna, but she says that she climbed Stromboli a couple of years ago. They ask me if I think that Etna will erupt today. I wonder why they think I'll know. The girl has her fingers crossed as she waits for my response. Do they really think that I'd be up here today if I thought it was going to blow its top? They say that the whole place looks like Mars. I haven't been to Mars recently, but it's a bit hard to disagree.

The climb beyond the top of the cable car is via a large vehicle that looks like a cross between a jeep and a bus, which takes us along a windy and very dusty track through an ash field. It seems that climbing even further beyond the end of the track requires a guided expedition. We still seem to be quite a long way from the summit, but there's a crater here nonetheless. There's steam rising up through the ground everywhere, and it's very damp underfoot when I scratch the surface with my shoes.

It seems to be customary to tell the world that you've been here by spelling your name out in small rocks laid out on the ash. This would probably be alright if your name was Ed or Al, but I think you might spend most of your day here doing nothing other than collecting rocks and laying them out if your name was something longer and more Italian. I hope that Michelangelo, for example, might have had better and safer things to do with his time than spending hours piling up rocks on the slopes of a very active volcano.

It seems that Etna is a very serious volcano. I read that it's by far the largest active volcano in Italy, and one of the most active in the world. It's in an almost constant state of eruption. Most happen at the summit where there are currently five craters, but these don't usually threaten inhabited areas. More worrying are the so-called flank eruptions. These occur through more than 300 vents down to a few hundred metres above sea level, some of which are close to or even within inhabited areas. There have been more than 60 flank eruptions since 1600 AD, and it seems that these are becoming more frequent; nearly half of them have been in the last hundred years, and they can sometimes continue for more than a year. In 1928 a very severe eruption almost completely destroyed the town of Mascali in only two days, and only a very few buildings survived. When eruptions cause lava flows to threaten villages, engineers are called in to build barriers or to set off explosions to redirect the flow. In 1981 these efforts saved the town of Randazzo, with the loss of only one building. I'm an engineer, but I think I must have been at the pub on the day we had the lecture on how to divert lava flows. In 1987 a very sudden explosion near the summit killed two tourists, and an eruption in 2001 destroyed the cable car station and it had to be rebuilt. An eruption in 2002/03 threw up an ash cloud that was clearly visible from space; some fell in Libya nearly 400 kilometres away. The mountain's currently around 3,300 metres high, but this changes regularly due to summit eruptions.

It seems that someone at some stage decided that it would be a good idea if the borders of ten municipalities met at the Mount Etna's summit, which apparently makes it the most complicated political boundary anywhere on the planet north of the South Pole. The summit also moves around due to eruptions, so I'm not quite sure how anyone works out exactly where it is at any one point in time. That said I suspect this probably doesn't matter all that much; I'm not sure there'd be a lot of need up there to make sure that your rubbish is getting collected by the right council.

I'm directed into a souvenir shop, which sells every conceivable size and shape of trinket and souvenir, all carved out of volcanic rock. This is a bit of an improvement on Mount Vesuvius, where someone tried to sell me a piece of volcanic rock which hadn't been carved into anything. I'm not quite sure why they thought I might want to pay for it; there didn't seem to be too much stopping me just picking any random rock up off the ground.

Back in Siracusa and we dine in a cute restaurant in a narrow alleyway. We toast a red letter day - the four volcanoes have now been ticked off - Vesuvius, Vulcano, Stromboli and Etna.

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