excursion Archives

Discover Giarre and its monuments … including Etna!

Posted on 22/07/2024 (21/12/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

Giarre is a delightful town located halfway between Catania and Taormina, with an airy and colourful historic core that includes neoclassical churches, Art Nouveau buildings and… a volcano! Exactly. Mount Etna is fully included among the “urban” monuments of Giarre, because from the town’s central square the view of the great volcano is so full […]

Birches of Etna and the climate change

Posted on 15/07/2024 (20/12/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

They arrived in Sicily “against their will”, transported by the conditions created thanks to the immense glaciations that hit Europe between 70,000 and 10,000 years ago. The birch trees of Mount Etna remained even after the ice retreated, finding an ideal habitat on this gigantic volcano which today reaches 3369 meters high. The Scandinavian plants […]

Tour on Mt Etna: what you can and cannot do

Posted on 08/07/2024 (20/12/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

It can happen. It happens. The tourist arrives with many expectations… he/she wants to see an eruption, a crater, a mountain slope, but the guide must dismantle their enthusiasm. And immediately there is disbelief, anger and a negative review! “They promised me a ride on off-road tracks but instead we took normal asphalted roads!”, “We […]

Etna: the great Voragine eruption started

Posted on 04/07/2024 (20/12/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

The Institute of Volcanology (INGV) statement took a while to arrive, but in the end it declared what all of us inhabitants – and lucky tourists – were already seeing. The explosive activity of the Voragine crater, one of the four summits of Etna, increased dramatically during the afternoon and evolved into a lava fountain […]

The Voragine: is the eruption coming to its top?

Posted on 30/06/2024 (20/12/2024) by Grazia Musumeci

With the statement issued by the INGV (Geo-Volcanology Institute) on 29th June, the eruption at Mt Etna’s Voragine crater, one of the largest among the summit ones, seems to be coming to its top. “It seems”, we must say, because Etna does its own thing, and almost never respects the parameters and signals that it […]