excursion Archives

Celebrating Mother (Etna)’s Day

Posted on 08/05/2023 (22/01/2025) by Grazia Musumeci

On the second Sunday of May, almost everywhere in the world, Mother’s Day is celebrated. And usually a mother is seen as a loving, sweet, kind, pretty figure. How could all of these tender qualities apply… to an active volcano? Yet it is so. For the people of Catania and its surroundings, the volcano Mount […]

Labour Day at Murazzo Rotto of Randazzo

Posted on 30/04/2023 (22/01/2025) by Grazia Musumeci

Perhaps not everyone knows that Sicily, for a short period of its history, had independence aims that have recently returned to the fore. To calm those aims, the island obtained a special statute that binds it to Italy in an almost federal way. The few who believed in the dream of independence fought even bloody […]

Pedara, a volcanic land of Gods

Posted on 24/04/2023 (21/01/2025) by Grazia Musumeci

The legend – perhaps linked to a story so ancient as to have been lost – tells that the place where Pedara stands today was dedicated to Jupiter, the father of all the gods. And he was celebrated by a magnificent temple, an “ara” which was impossible not to admire. The lands “at the foot […]

Etna Spring Tourist Trip 2: the Forty-Hour water stream

Posted on 16/04/2023 (22/01/2025) by Grazia Musumeci

The beauty of a high and ancient volcano like Mount Etna is also manifested in its “mountain” characteristics. Indeed, unlike other more arid volcanoes, Etna reaches heights that allow it to have well-defined seasons and well-defined phenomena linked to them. The moment of snowmelt is one of those fascinating phenomena which, thanks to the volcanic […]

Mt. Etna’s eruption of 1843 and the Big Explosion

Posted on 08/04/2023 (22/01/2025) by Grazia Musumeci

Can the world end in just 11 days? Maybe not, for many of us, but for those who experienced the November 1843 eruption of Mount Etna up close, that must have been the sensation. And for some of them the world really ended that week. A brief but violent, intense event that left a trail […]