Catania Archives

Mount Etna’s summer place 1: Simeto River

Posted on 18/06/2023 (09/09/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

Tourists arriving in Sicily almost always look for river Alcantara, and only river Alcantara. As if beyond the famous “river of the gorges” there was nothing else. Yet the Simeto river, which cuts the eastern part of the island diagonally to flow between Catania and Syracuse, is one of the most interesting and beautiful water […]

About Mount Etna’s eruption of 1669

Posted on 30/01/2023 (09/09/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

It was a hundred and twenty-two days of apocalypse on earth. And the chronicles handed down from father to son still speak of it as one of the greatest eruptions ever recorded in the modern era. That of 1669, on the southern slope of Mount Etna, still remains today a grandiose natural event, devastating but […]

How to make Arab Bread and how to eat it

Posted on 23/01/2023 (09/09/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

Over the centuries, the territory of Mount Etna has unfortunately lost almost every trace of Arab domination. A not very long historical period (it lasted about two centuries) which left wonderful works of art and engineering in a large part of Sicily. These works are still there, in western Sicily, but here on the east […]

The 2002 earthquake

Posted on 24/10/2022 (09/09/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

On October 29th, 2022, a good slice of the towns on the eastern side of Etna will remember the twentieth anniversary of an event that few others in Italy will remember. That same day, in 2002, in fact, a serious earthquake struck the municipalities of Acireale, Giarre, Zafferana Etnea and Santa Venerina causing considerable damage, […]

Mystery … or just a tale … of the “volcano of Riposto”

Posted on 04/07/2022 (09/09/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

It was 2009 when a study conducted by the School of Geology of the University of Catania observed something strange off the port of Riposto. A very deep coast suddenly “returned to the surface” with a compact shape, typical of a hill or a mountain, and then collapsed again. A cone, in short, a real […]