Day 2 - Ooooh Etna – take my soul

Ooooh, Mount Etna. Our first meeting dates back to a few years ago during a cruise around the Mediterranean. Mount Etna was the first thing we saw that morning when we opened the curtains. And it was love at first sight. Majestically, the fire-breathing mountain dominated the eastern side of the island.

There is a thin line between love and hate  and that is also the case for Mount Etna.

Mount Etna is loved but also hated at the same time. Hated for being one of the most active volcanoes, for which many people have fled and also causing massive devastation and destruction. But also loved  because it is precisely this volcanic rock that contains many minerals and so provides a very fertile soil. It mainly grows lemons, oranges and pistachios. Sicily is also Italy's most important wine producer.

Sicily is clearly a country of opposites. It is both fire and snow, beautiful vegetation as well as black lava.

Anyway, Mount Etna has a certain appeal. D.H. Lawrence described this in his 'Sea and Sardinia' as follows:

‘This timeless Grecian Etna, in her lower-heaven loveliness, so lovely, so lovely, what a torturer! Not many men can really stand her, without losing their souls. She's like Circe. Unless a man is very strong, she takes his soul away from him and leaves him not a beast, but an elemental creature, intelligent and soulless. Intelligent, almost inspired, and soulless, like the Etna Sicilians. Intelligent daimons, and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on earth. Ah, horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls'.

And I'm sure that before the end of the day, Mount Etna will have broken my soul too...

When we open the curtains this morning, no Etna can be seen this time. But what we do get to see is not giving us much joy. It's pouring cats and dogs accompanied by thunderstorms. Welcome to Sicily.

We start the day in good spirits. Normally you can see Etna from afar, but today it is covered in dark clouds. We drive up Mount Etna via the southern route. The bus can only drive up to 1,900 m, because that is where the road stops. It is a winding road, but the weather also gets a little bit better. The first stop we make is at the end of a lava flow that dates back to 1991/1992, when the erruption of Mount Etna lasted a whopping 463 days, the longest ever.

We drive into the clouds and hope for better weather higher up. The vegetation changes from deciduous trees to citrus groves and vineyards, eventually ending in black lava.

When we arrive at the bus parking, it is heavily clouded but it is not raining. That makes us a little happier. From the bus parking you can take the cable car up to an altitude of 2,250 m. From here you can go even higher with a jeep to an altitude of 2,900 m. Here you end up in the lunar landscape with craters and you can get close to the south-eastern crater. With its 3,350 m altitude, Mount Etna is the highest but also the most active volcano in Europe. Due to this activity, the real top is not accessible. It soon becomes apparent that the weather at the top is changing and there are a lot of clouds. The jeeps don't even go out because the weather on the highest peaks is so bad.

Mount Etna is the boss and has decided that we are not going to see her today.

Fortunately, we are staying in Taormina for another week after our round trip on the island and I realize that I may get another chance to climb Etna. My soul was not broken today, but I do curse Etna. But I'm not giving up. I'll be back.

I kill the time by taking a short hike to the dead crater 'Silvestri' that is a little further away. Here we can see down the crater. I have just reached the crater rim as the rain starts pouring down again and I end up soaking wet. The lava splashes up to my knees. At this rate I'm going to have too few clothes with me...

For now I can only keep dreaming of the top of Mount Etna. But we are in Sicily, the roots of Europe, and there are still beautiful things on the program and maybe next week I will get lucky.

La vita e bella.