Mount Etna is the largest volcano in the Europe. This very active volcano is 3,270 metres high and its cone measures about 40 kilometres in diameter. However it has little to do with the rest of Sicily’s geology. Vulcanologists believe its career began under the sea from where it pushed its way up to become part of Sicily. More than 135 eruptions have been recorded, beginning in 475 B.C., when both Pindar and Aeschylus wrote about a great volcanic explosion. Some 30 or 40 years later the pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles from Agrigento, committed a strange suicide by leaping into Etna’s 25-mile-diameter crater, either to prove his divinity or that hot air rises. Several eruptions in the Middle Ages reached the sea. The worst eruption on record, in 1669, was caused by a wide gap that opened up from the summit to the town of Nicolosi, causing lava to overwhelm most of Catania. The volcano has certainly been quiet, if not as ruinously active since then, and tourist excursions to the summit may occasionally be cancelled due to uncertain volcanic conditions. An observatory at the summit monitors Etna’s activity.
The attraction of the ascent lies in the tremendous views and the wonderfully fertile pedemontana (lower slopes) cultivated to 600 metres and the forests that grow as high as 1,000 metres, rather than in the repulsive desert zone above where ash and lava too thinly cover the fires below. With its clefts and subsidiary volcanoes, fumarole and vapour jets, this is nature in its uttermost indifference, at its most inimical to life. The contrast between this and the pedemontana, which supports a population of up to 600 people per square kilometre, is most extraordinary in summer, when the snow melts, cold ash is laid over it where it lies in clefts of the mountain’s north face. This preserves it throughout the hot season. Nowadays, there is little call for expensively transported snow in summer, but this was formerly a flourishing trade, the monopoly of the bishops of Catania, who, to their great profit, exported it over considerable distances. Graceful presents of snow to such dignitaries as the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta at Valletta, or the Pope himself at Rome, usually led to most satisfactory orders for more.