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A photo of Mt. Etna erupting on the front page of the paper was the cue for this trip. I saw the photo in the morning, and by the afternoon I’d booked my flight to Catania, at the foot of the mountain and persuaded two friends to come with me.  We were young and naive and it’s amazing we even got to the airport given the extreme lack of planning.  We didn’t even have a guidebook, but somehow this didn’t deter us at all.

Our flight was at 7am. Having slept at Heathrow to make our early check-in we were not exactly fizzing with energy on our first day. We we hardly conscious as we flew over the Alps, but I was awake and slightly nervous as we descended over Sicily.  We banked heavily and looked right down onto Etna’s summit, which was steaming gently in the bright morning sun.

We walked out of tiny Catania airport to see Mt. Etna itself soaring into the sky, and took a bus that was going towards it.  We found our way to a village called Zafferana, at 800m above sea level on the eastern flank of the mountain, and booked into a cheap hotel.  The owner didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Italian, but we both spoke German.

After a quick recce of the road out of town, along which we planned to hike the next day, we spent the evening sampling local cuisine in a friendly little restaurant down the hill from where we were staying.  We discovered caffè corretto that evening, and after a few of those and a bottle or two of wine, our walk back up the hill was slow and indirect. Half way home, we wondered which direction the summit of the mountain was. We looked up. A bright red glow suddenly appeared high above us. That would be it then.