All the hotheads in this picture
have cooled off somewhat.
Upon leaving Catania, our first stop was on the way up Mount Etna. (Technically we had been on the mountain awhile as Catania and many other Sicilian towns are built right on its slopes. In fact, our guide claimed that Etna occupies 17% of the Sicilian land mass). Etna is Sicily's tallest mountain (about 11,000 feet) and the largest volcano by far in Europe. It has had 135 documented eruptions and obviously a lot more as it has been around for a half million years, about a 100 times longer than we have had history. The worst known eruption was in 1669 when a huge lava mass wiped out a lot of Catania before flowing into the sea (and moving Catania's harbor). The most recent eruption was in 1991 and I believe the house below was buried at that time. Many of the folks in Europe build houses in caves, but in this case, the cave came to the house:
We had first seen Mount Etna as we flew into Sicily as it poked its steamy head above the clouds. This time our bus started at the bottom and made its way up three distinct landscapes. First you see the fertile lower slopes which are essentially farmland sprinkled with pine trees somewhat like the picture below with the volcano in the background. Hopefully your screen resolution will show the white steam coming out of the peak at the distant left:
Lava destroys just about everything, creating a desert. Over time, other volcanic ash gets added to it and breaks down into a very fertile, mineral-rich soil.
Moving higher, the landscape gets more desertlike and the lava rock begins to grow increasingly massive:
At the top, the landscape may be totally black like the picture below showing a totally black crater in the middle ground of about 50-100 years old. (The blacker the lava, the more recent). Older craters would have some vegetation on them like the one near the front of the picture. In some cases, the lava may completely bypass an area leaving the vegetation intact as we see in the far upper right:
We found the mountain to constantly make noise like thunder. Several days later while far away in the southern section of the island, we could still hear that ominous mountain rumbling.
After Etna, we journeyed northward towards the Messina straits, stopping at perhaps the most picaresque town in Sicily called Taormina. Please join us by clicking here.
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