ITALY OF VOLCANOES

Naturally exuberant

They are charming, they strike fear into people, anyway they attract as magnets. They are the volcanoes, charismatic giants that have been present in Italy for thousands of years. Mystery is in the air on top of their cones and becomes a fatal attraction: in fact we are attracted by the things we don’t know.

The philosopher Empedocles had the same point of view, according to the legend he jumped into the Etna’s crater (Sicily) since he couldn’t resist its burning call. Pliny the Younger wasn’t different, in a letter he wrote to Tacitus he showed an astonishing and strange admiration for the awful show offered by the Vesuvius (Campania) during the eruption of 79 AD. Nowadays the crater is asleep but you never know. The same goes with other Italian volcanoes, more or less ten, and thirty geographical areas to be explored with their regional and national parks and mountain communities. Four are still active areas, they are in Sicily where there is a guinness volcano, the Etna; with its 3.350 metres it is the highest active volcano in Europe, followed by the amazing ones of Eolie islands.
The Vesuvius is famous all around the world – the correct name is “volcanic area of Somma-Vesuvio” – in the same province there is also the volcanic area of Campi Flegrei. In Campania two other volcanoes stand out: on the Ischia Island – the volcanic cone of the Epomeo Mountain, it is quite high but it has been silent for one thousand three hundred years –  and the one on Procida Island.
In order to go deep into the knowledge of volcanoes you can’t miss the volcano in Lazio and the one of the Amiata Mountains, in Tuscany while the last “couple” of volcanoes is in the Centre-North of Italy, on the Euganei hills (Colli Euganei) in the Venetian countryside.
A unique presence of lava territories in Italy, featured by an amazing landscape.

Did you know that…
There’s the fire inside, there’s the ice outside. That is the Etna, the natural landmark of the Sicilian contradictions and – as the alpine guides at three thousand meters of altitude want to state – it is not a “volcano”, it is a volcanic “system” with a number of different craters and more than 230 fumaroles.


For more information of Etna: click here

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