This one is filed under Italy. It counts. But I should be honest with you from the start — this is not how we do things.
No Sarah. No independent research, no quiet morning arrival, no sense of arriving somewhere on our own terms. This was a work trip, and the colleagues who invited me along knew I was planning to move to Italy, which is probably why they thought it would be a kindness to say: we’re going up Etna. You’re coming.
They weren’t wrong.
The “I Love ETNA” sign at base camp, Randazzo. The mountain visible behind it, entirely unbothered.
Not quite how we’d do it
You drive up to basecamp to start the tour has a small strip of wooden huts. A photo gallery. Souvenir shops. A car park that somehow exists at nearly 2,000 metres. It has the slightly surreal quality of a tourist facility that knows it’s perched on something that could, at any point, end it. The mountain behind all of it — just getting on with being a mountain.
The lower slopes are handled by vehicle. Big, hard-wearing people carriers — the kind built for terrain that would end a normal car — take you from the base up to the next check-point. I sat in one and thought: Sarah would have walked this. Without question. She’d have been half a kilometre ahead before anyone had finished arguing about seats.
But I was a guest, and the group had its own rhythm, and sometimes you go along with the rhythm.
The halfway point has a small strip of wooden huts. A photo gallery. Souvenir shops. A car park that somehow exists at nearly 2,000 metres. It has the slightly surreal quality of a tourist facility that knows it’s perched on something that could, at any point, end it. The mountain behind all of it — just getting on with being a mountain.
A weather and seismic observatory, looking down from near the summit. The tiny building. The tiny vehicle on the track. The void between.
The guide
From the halfway point, you hike. Yellow helmets issued. Face coverings advised. The guide — warm, precise, clearly someone who has done this a hundred times and still means it — took us through what the mountain is, what it does, how it moves. She pointed to a lava flow from a few years ago. Pointed to another from before that. The layers of it, the timeline written in black rock. You’re not standing on geology. You’re standing on a sequence of events that is still ongoing.
I noticed at some point that I was listening properly. Not half-listening while thinking about the next shot. Actually paying attention. That doesn’t happen as often as it should.
The summit cone from mid-slope, venting. Still active. Still entirely in charge.
Above the clouds
There is a specific moment on the climb where you come up over a ridge and the cloud layer is below you. Not around you. Below. The Ionian Sea is visible above it. Sicily is spread out in the middle distance. The black ash and snow underfoot and the Mediterranean above the clouds and you are, by any reasonable measure, standing on a volcano.
I thought about how I’d describe this to Sarah. Thought about how different it would have felt to arrive here the way we usually arrive places — off a train, map in pocket, no plan. Thought that we’ll come back. Do it properly. Walk the whole thing from the bottom. One Day, Maybe.
Looking south from near the summit. Sicily below the cloud layer, the sea beyond it. Snow on black lava. October.
At the top
The summit area is busy. Multiple groups, multiple guides, yellow and blue and orange helmets moving between rocks. You have to watch your footing and give way and accept that you are not alone up here. That’s fine. The mountain is big enough.
The gas venting from the crater walls is not subtle. It comes out in great white columns and the sulphur smell catches you mid-breath. The rock around the crater is green — genuinely, vividly green from the minerals — in a way that makes no sense against everything else up here that is black.
We stood on a rock outcrop and someone took the photo. The group against the sky. A helicopter passing behind us at what felt like the same altitude. One of those images that looks like it should be on a poster but is actually just a Tuesday in October with people from work.
The group at the summit. That helicopter is not below us.
What it added
I’ve walked a lot of Italy now. Cities mostly — the slow accumulation of streets and squares and coffee and distance on foot. This was none of that. No history, no architecture, no feeling out the bones of a place to see if it might be home.
But it was still Italy. The guide was Italian, warm and generous with her knowledge in the way that seems to come naturally here. The light was Italian — that particular quality of October afternoon light that I’ve started to recognise and look for. The landscape was like nothing I’d seen anywhere, in Italy or elsewhere.
I came down the mountain still planning to move here. It would not be Sicily though, but it just strengthened what we already knew about Ravenna. That felt like enough.
Descending. The ash path, the cloud layer, the crater ridge. The way down is always faster.
Mount Etna, Sicily – 3.14 miles – 1hr 58m – 1,320ft elevation – 8,668 steps