We found ourselves standing in front of the elephant in Piazza del Duomo just after 9 in the morning on Saturday, waiting for a guy to pick us up to go to Mt. Etna. We had booked the tour through our hotel, which had a very reasonable price for an almost personal tour.
There ended up being four of us, Husbear and me along with a woman and her daughter from Genova – a very strange duo. (The daughter, perhaps painfully shy, didn’t say anything for the first fifteen minutes of the ride, at which point she perked up and yelled “ELEPHANTS!” The mother had one eye of her glasses completely covered with tape and smoked like a chimney. A lovely family.)
Our guide, who never gave us his name, was a geology teacher who ran these tours I suppose in his spare time. We got into his Spanish 4X4 and drove for about 45 minutes out of Catania and up the slopes of Etna, Europe’s most active volcano.
Soon enough, the greens and grays of the city gave way to the black of lava and the white of snow.
We turned down a smaller road, where we got out to see the first of Etna’s craters. The snow was completely covering the ground at this point, and there were lots of Italian families sledding and playing. The crater quietly smoked away above them.
After getting out to admire the crater, we hopped back in the car. Our guide tried to take us a little further up, but the road soon became completely iced over and impassable (and parked up on both sides with cars) so we backed down the road, turned around, and took a different route up. This way turned out to be extremely busy as well (due to the holiday, everyone was out skiing and sledding), but we soon found a parking place in front of an enormous bar.
We climbed a slick hillside,
where we saw a woman who for some reason decided to visit Mt. Etna in dress shoes fall down about five times, and we learned the difference between red lava and black lava. Red’s oxidized, if you were wondering…
The ridge we were standing on was very steep, and a lot of people were using it for sledding. I couldn’t believe how crowded the area was, and it seemed to be all Italians. Some areas were still gently smoking (this lava is from the eruption in 2001-2002) and those were the only places not covered with snow. For obvious reasons.
Back down to the 4X4, we barely managed not to fall down the hill
(I scooted down with my feet curled under me and people falling down all around).
Since we were traveling with Italians, we of course had to stop at the bar for a couple of caffés, and then we got back into the 4X4 and drove about 40 feet only to find ourselves at a total impasse.
Apparently, there’s a large parking lot up on Etna for all of these skiers, but they don’t want to use it because it isn’t right on top of the snow. Therefore, they park on the actual through road, turning what is already a fairly narrow street into a nearly impassable one-and-a-half lane road. Tour busses and campers use it, too, making getting by even more impossible.
After sitting without moving for ten minutes or so, our guide got out and ran around the tour bus well ahead of us and magically after a few seconds traffic started moving again. Unfortunately, we only traveled perhaps a quarter of a mile before coming to a complete stop once again, at which point our guide hopped out and worked his magic again. We couldn’t believe it – who was the first jackass to decide that the street would make a good parking lot?
This jockeying for position turned out to be worth it, however – after driving a little ways further with no more problems, we pulled off by the side of the road where we were given helmets and around the neck flashlights and led into a little hole hidden by guardrails.
What we were being led into is called a lava tube, and it was formed by lava hardening after the eruption of 1792. First, the lava formed a channel, then, a roof hardened over it, and then the lava traveling through the tube became lower and lower. This left a fairly long cave with a floor of rocky lava and a few bats clinging here and there to the roots hanging from the ceiling.
The tube was great, and it certainly wasn’t something we would have seen on our own!
Our last stop, on the way back to Catania, was at the small town of Zafferano. During the eruption in 1992, lava came very close to engulfing Zafferano, stopping just above the town due to the efforts of the Italians and the U.S. Army, who brought in helicopters and dynamite to try to turn the lava aside. We went to the point where the lava stopped, where the townspeople have put up a shrine to the Madonna.
And that was the end of our tour. The guide dropped us back off at Piazza del Duomo, where we found a café for lunch and a not-so-good cannolo.
We found Catania’s old castle, which was closed up but tight. I had read a description of the castle as “engulfed by lava”, but it didn’t really look all that engulfed to us.
Walking back to the hostel to avail ourselves of the Internet and get a few of these posts up, we saw this. Firebombed, perhaps, with the Duomo in the back.
One of the things we learned to love about Catania in the two days we were there is their chioscos (pronounced kiosko), which were all over the city and served fresh fruit sodas. We weren’t able to figure out all the ins and outs, including why sea salt was added to some of the drinks to make them fizz like crazy, but we did try a couple of sodas made with fresh fruit syrups. Here, we tried sour cherry and peach.
After waaay too long on the Internet, we returned for dinner to a place called Il Pizzolio, which served traditional pizzoli from a town called Sortino. They’re sort of like pizzas, but stuffed. We had a wonderful time, and the waiters were great, but it turned out to be a little on the expensive side. The dessert was awesome, though, a pizzolo stuffed with lemon curd with lemon rind on top. Really nice and refreshing.
They wrapped our leftover stewed pork pizzolo in a box marked “Texas and Chicago.”
Another enormous dinner under our belts, back to the hostel and to bed. Tomorrow, on to Siracusa, where we’ll walk in the steps of Archimedes!
