We’d now been in Taormina for practically a week and still hadn’t done the one unmissable activity any visitor to Sicily would hope to experience, scaling Mt. Etna. In the days already passed we had seen her from a distance at the Teatro Greco and from the hilly streets of Taormina. We had viewed her clouded over, dark and monstrous on some days, while imposing, menacing and dominating the clear blue skies on others. On Day 7 she was the latter, and we knew we were in for something special.
Mt. Etna rises over 3,000 ft in height and is the largest active volcano in Europe. There was a part of me that wondered whether there wasn’t a certain daring about climbing a volcanic mountain that’s most recent eruption occurred only a month prior to our visit, especially when our guide books’ notes suggested that some routes laid out on its map were subject to alteration depending on the latest changes in landscape caused by various erupted matter.
Nevertheless we made our way to a point some half way up the north side of the mountain called Piano Provenzana from where we could pick up a four-wheel drive tour that would take us even closer to the summit. One thing’s for sure, there was no way our hire car was going to make it up an off-road track of volcanic sand and rock. The vehicle that would be negotiating the ascent wasn’t a traditional four-by-four jeep, but a mammoth-wheeled twenty-person bus. With eighteen fellow amateur mountaineers on board and one Sicilian driver we set off for the apex. The muscle-engined Mercedes made steady if somewhat bumpy progress as its passengers slid into one another smiling like children in the back seat of a car on windy country lanes, except for the occasional look of concern as we sidled up precariously close to another precipice.
This was of course the lazy-man’s way to make it to the top, but we didn’t have time for bona fide mountaineering. Instant gratification is the motto of the modern world after all. Once our truck could go no further we disembarked to be greeted by our “guide”. He was like something out of one of those Olive spread ads, an elderly Italian man whose lifetime diet had consisted of fish and pasta meaning despite his advanced years he was as healthy as a runner bean, shockingly a sixty-nine year old one at that.
He led the tourist party up the final gradient to Etna’s great Cratere Centrale. Some of us struggling to keep up with him more than others, as he patiently awaited the group at various stop-points. By now the cameras were out in force, as we looked out over north-eastern Sicily, south-western Italy and the Mediterranean. At the crater’s edge we peered down into the abyss and circled around it via craggy paths covered in yellow sulphur that gave off a constant vapour which one mistakes as a smouldering smoke when looking up from the bottom.
Of everything we would do in Sicily, there was never going to be anything to match this and we were lucky to do it on such a gloriously clear day. It didn’t matter that the high-altitude caused your breathing to labour or that the sulphuric fumes caused a fit of coughing. To look down over the world from such a height must be one of those things that the ancient Greeks who once ruled the area might’ve thought was as close as a man could come to being a god.
I cant wait to visit