Mount Etna

Today we start at 8 am for our trip to Mount Etna. We’ll drive up to the Sapienza Refuge area which has the Silvestri Craters.

It took a little over two hours to drive up there. We had a stop before we started climbing up the mountain to photograph it from a distance.

Then we drove up to the the crater area at 6250 ft elevation. It was clouding up There are two craters that are easily accessible. We chose to hike the taller crater first. There are two paths up, a steeper, shorter path and the more shallow, but slightly longer path. We chose the more shallow path barely visible to the steep path straight ahead.

From the top of the taller crater, it’s easy to see the smaller crater.

There was a gentleman playing a soprano saxaphone in the bottom of the small crater. I did record a video, but it has a lot of wind noise in it. I’ll see what I can do at home on the computer to clean it up.

The restaurant was selling a “fire of the volcano” liquor that had a high alcohol content.

On the way down, we passed a number of cyclists riding up. They were all wearing the same jersey, so I think it was a bike club ride.

Then we drove back to the hotel and got ready for our home hosted lunch. There were a number of narrow roads on the way there.

Our hosts ran a small restaurant and the husband could be the chef, but hired someone. There were lots of tasty appetizers.

At 5:30 pm we had a speaker come to the hotel to talk about Mt. Etna and other volcanos in Italy, Vulcanologist Boris Behncke, who works for the Italian equivalent of the US Geological Survey monitoring the volcanos.

While Etna is the most active volcano, it’s not the one they are most worried about. Campi Flegrei wins that title. It’s a large volcano that a number of suburbs of Naples are built on. There are around 800,000 people that will need to move when it becomes dangerous.

We had supper on our own at Fuoco a pizza place recommended by our home hosts. We had a pizza with pistachio pesto on it. It was really good.