Mount Etna

• 1. Introduction

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  Mount Etna stands 3,403 metres above the east coast of Sicily, a figure measured in September 2024 that refuses to stay still. Its height changes with every summit eruption. In 2021 the southeastern crater rose to 3,357 metres, only to be overtaken by the Voragine crater after the eruptions of summer 2024. This is a mountain that rewrites its own statistics. It sits in the Metropolitan City of Catania, between the cities of Messina and Catania, in an almost constant state of activity. Why has a peak this dangerous drawn farmers, poets, kings, and filmmakers to its slopes for thousands of years? What did the ancients believe was trapped beneath it? And how do people live within reach of lava that has buried whole villages? The answers run from a Phoenician word for furnace to a fascist propaganda campaign, from a Chinese traveller's diary to a galaxy far, far away.

• 2. The Mountain Of Fire

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  Jabal al-Nar, the Mountain of Fire, is what Arabic speakers call Etna, and the name fits a peak whose very title may mean burning. One view traces the word Etna to the Greek verb aitho, meaning to burn, carried through the sound shifts of Koine Greek. Another derives it from the Indo-European root meaning to burn or fire. A competing theory points to the Phoenician word attuna, meaning furnace or chimney. In Classical Greek it was Aitne, in Latin Aetna. The mountain carries two more local names. In Sicilian it is Muncibbeddu, in Italian Mongibello, both thought to combine a Romance word for mountain with the Arabic jabal, which also means mountain, so the name says mountain twice over. Another idea ties Mongibello to the Latin Mulciber, one of the names of the god Vulcan, glossed as he who placates the fire. Today Mongibello names the area holding the two central craters and the craters southeast and northeast of the cone. Etna covers 1,190 square kilometres with a basal circumference of 140 kilometres, making it by far the largest of Italy's four active volcanoes. It stands about two and a half times the height of the next largest, Mount Vesuvius.

• 3. Gods And Kings Below

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  Vulcan, the Roman god of blacksmithing, was said to keep his forge beneath this mountain, as was his Greek counterpart Hephaestus. In Greek mythology the deadly monster Typhon was trapped under Etna by Zeus, the god of the sky and thunder and king of the gods. The mountain's myths did not stay classical. In Arthurian romance, the name Mongibel attaches to the otherworld castle of Morgan le Fay and her half-brother King Arthur, placed at Etna by Breton storytellers who came with the Norman occupiers of Sicily. Welsh ideas about a dwarf king of a Celtic underworld became attached to Arthur as Ruler of the Antipodes, then transplanted into a Sicilian setting. The medievalist Roger Sherman Loomis cites Gervase of Tilbury and Caesarius of Heisterbach, writing in the late twelfth century, who told of Arthur returning a lost horse that had wandered into his subterranean kingdom beneath Etna. Caesarius named his source as a canon Godescalcus of Bonn, who held the tale to be historical fact from the time of Emperor Henry's conquest of Sicily around 1194. Caesarius used the Latin phrase in monte Gyber, within Etna, for Arthur's kingdom. A fairy of Etna also appears in Jaufre, the only surviving Arthurian romance in Occitan, composed between 1180 and 1230. There the fairy queen, clearly Morgan le Fay, rules a realm reached not through a fiery grotto but through a spring, closer to her older watery associations. A separate Sicilian idea, the Fata Morgana, names an optical phenomenon common in the Strait of Messina.

• 4. How Etna Erupts

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  Five distinct craters mark Etna's summit: the Northeast Crater, the Voragine, the Bocca Nuova, and two at the Southeast Crater Complex. Most eruptions happen here, where activity can be highly explosive and spectacular yet rarely threatens the inhabited areas around the volcano. The flanks tell a different story. More than 300 vents pock the sides of the mountain, ranging from small holes in the ground to large craters hundreds of metres across. Flank eruptions can break out as low as a few hundred metres in altitude, close to or even within inhabited areas, and numerous villages and small towns sit on the cones of past flank eruptions. Since AD 1600, at least 60 flank eruptions and countless summit eruptions have occurred, with nearly half happening since the start of the 20th century. The fertile volcanic soils this activity produces support extensive agriculture, with vineyards and orchards across the lower slopes and the broad Plain of Catania to the south. The United Nations has designated Etna a Decade Volcano because of its recent activity and nearby population. In June 2013 it was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

• 5. Half A Million Years

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  About 500,000 years ago, the first volcanic activity at Etna took place beneath the sea, off the ancient coastline of Sicily. Around 300,000 years ago, volcanism began southwest of the present summit, then moved towards the present centre 170,000 years ago, building the first major edifice through alternating explosive and effusive eruptions. Major eruptions sometimes collapsed the summit into calderas. From about 35,000 to 15,000 years ago, highly explosive eruptions generated large pyroclastic flows and left extensive ignimbrite deposits, with ash carried as far as south of Rome's border, 800 kilometres to the north. Thousands of years ago, the eastern flank suffered a catastrophic collapse, an enormous landslide similar to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. It carved the depression known as the Valle del Bove, the Valley of the Ox. Research published in 2006 placed this collapse around 8,000 years ago and linked it to a huge tsunami that left traces across the eastern Mediterranean. The valley walls have collapsed repeatedly since, exposing strata that record Etna's eruptive history. The most recent summit collapse, about 2,000 years ago, formed the Piano Caldera, now nearly filled by later lava but still visible as a break in the slope. The whole massif is moving towards the Mediterranean Sea at an average of 14 millimetres per year, sliding on an unconsolidated layer above older terrain.

• 6. Eruptions In The Record

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  Diodorus Siculus left the first known record of an eruption at Etna. In 396 BCE, an eruption reportedly thwarted the Carthaginians as they tried to advance on Syracuse during the Second Sicilian War. A violent Plinian summit eruption in 122 BCE dropped heavy tephra to the southeast, collapsing many roofs in the town of Catania. To aid reconstruction, the Roman government exempted the people of Catania from taxes for ten years. An eruption in 44 BCE was followed by famine in China, the Roman Republic, and Egypt the next year, and Plutarch among others suggested a causal link, though an eruption of Mount Okmok early the following year is the more likely cause. The Roman poet Virgil gave what was probably a first-hand description of an eruption in the Aeneid. Around 1030 CE, an eruption near Monte Ilice sent a lava flow about 10 kilometres to the sea north of Acireale, and the villages of Santa Tecla and Stazzo now sit on the delta it built. Another eruption, around 1160 or 1224, broke from a low fissure near Mascalucia and reached the sea just north of Catania, in the area now called Ognina. The Chinese traveller Rabban Bar Sauma recorded an eruption on the 18th of June 1287.

• 7. Lava At The City Gates

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  On the 11th of March 1669, Etna began its most destructive eruption since 122 BCE. Lava flows destroyed at least 10 villages on the southern flank before reaching the walls of Catania five weeks later, on the 15th of April. The walls largely diverted the lava into the sea south of the city, filling Catania's harbour, though a small portion broke through a weak section on the western side and stopped behind the Benedictine monastery without reaching the centre. Widespread reports claimed up to 15,000 or even 20,000 deaths, yet contemporaneous Italian and English accounts mention no deaths from the 1669 eruption, while giving precise figures for buildings destroyed and land lost. One possibility is confusion with an earthquake that devastated southeast Sicily in 1693-24 years later. A study of Etna's historical eruptions finds only 77 deaths attributable with certainty to the volcano, most recently in 1987, when two tourists were killed by a sudden explosion near the summit. Since 1750, seven of Etna's eruptions have lasted more than five years, more than any volcano except Vesuvius. In 1928, lava destroyed a population centre for the first time since 1669. The eruption began high on the northeast flank on the 2nd of November, then opened fissures at decreasing elevations, the third and most vigorous breaking out late on the 4th of November at about 1,200 metres in a zone called Ripe della Naca. The village of Mascali below it was almost completely destroyed in two days, with only a church and a few buildings surviving in the north part called Sant'Antonino. The flow cut the Messina-Catania railway and destroyed Mascali's train station. Benito Mussolini's fascist regime used the disaster for propaganda, presenting the evacuation, aid, and rebuilding as models of fascist planning. Mascali was rebuilt on a new site, and its church holds the fascist symbol of the torch above the statue of Jesus Christ.

• 8. Living On The Volcano

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  Operation Hot Rock saved the town of Zafferana Etnea during the 1991-1993 eruption, when advancing lava came within a few hundred metres of its margin and destroyed only one building. Engineers first built earth barriers across the flow, hoping the eruption would end before the basins behind them filled. When lava overran the defences, they turned to explosives near the source, targeting a highly efficient lava tube that carried lava up to 7 kilometres downslope with little cooling. A major blast on the 23rd of May 1992 destroyed the tube and diverted the lava into a new artificial channel away from Zafferana, and output declined soon after, with the eruption ending on the 30th of March 1993 after 473 days. That endurance had company. The eruption that began on the 13th of May 2008, east of the summit craters, came with a swarm of more than 200 earthquakes and ran 417 days until the 6th of July 2009. The volcano keeps reaching into modern life in surprising ways. Footage from the 2002-2003 eruption, whose ash column was visible from space and fell as far as Libya 600 kilometres south, was recorded by Lucasfilm and folded into the planet Mustafar in the 2005 film Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. The July-August 2001 eruption drew heavy coverage because reporters were already in Italy for the G8 summit in Genoa. On the 3rd of December 2015, the Voragine crater shot a lava fountain a kilometre high. On the 16th of March 2017, magma exploding on contact with snow injured 10 people, including a BBC News television crew. Etna remains one of Sicily's main tourist draws, reached by the road to the Sapienza Refuge at 1,910 metres, where a cableway climbs to 2,500 metres and the crater area at 2,920 metres becomes accessible. On the 1st of January 2026, a flank eruption opened in the Valle del Bove at 2,100 metres and advanced down to 1,420 metres by the next day, with Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology warning that pressurised magma is still moving through the system.