Volcanoes as a natural art form

Introduction to the route

The proposed educational path provides a different view of the Aeolian Islands, contextualizing them within an open-air volcanological museum, where the volcanoes, and the shapes, colors and landscapes created by them, are true works of art.
Here then the sculptors and painters are none other than the volcanoes that have followed one another over time on the islands of Vulcano, Lipari, Salina, Filicudi, Alicudi, Panarea and Stromboli.
The Aeolian Islands entered by right in the UNESCO Wolrd Heritage List in 2000, thanks to their geological and volcanological heritage, unique in the world.
It is no coincidence that the Aeolian Islands are the birthplace of volcanology, understood as the science of the observation of volcanoes.
Even before Magna Graecia, which brought the Aeolian Islands to splendor, throughout the Mediterranean was known the “natural lighthouse” represented by the continuous eruptions of the island of Stromboli. The route then will interest the island of Vulcano, where the yellow brushstrokes of sulfur, given by the underwater fumaroles, stand out against the turquoise sea, and with the gray of the thermal mud pools.
Lipari, with its glorious history, which has made it the center of commercial routes in the Mediterranean, will be taken as an example to highlight how the fortifications and human architecture can merge with the black of volcanic rocks.
In Salina, Filicudi, Alicudi and Panarea the artists have been the wind and the sea, able to create in the stacks, in the rock arches, and in the caves of the real sculptures, always in evolution.
And finally Stromboli, the only island in the world where you can observe continuous eruptions from a terrace above the crater. A path of suggestions to recognize the Art of Nature.

The Thermal Baths of Saint Calogerus

Salina, the green island with twin mountains

The salt lake of Lingua

The ancient production of salt

Malvasia delle Lipari DOC

The polis of the living and the necropolis of the dead

The hidden part of the Aeolian Islands

“Vulcanian” eruptions

Lipari, where history intertwines with volcanoes to create archaeology

The malleability of Vulcano’s mud

The senses tell The Pumice Quarries of Lipari

Seven islands, dozens of volcanoes

Pollara, between poetry and beauty

Panarea and its history

The senses tell The Stacks of Panarea

The senses tell The summit craters

The Aeolian Islands, where volcanology was born

The senses tell The Village of Capo Graziano

The 2002-03 eruption

Lipari at the centre of Mediterranean history

Myths and legends about volcanoes

Filicudi: small island, big history

Volcanoes as a natural art form

Where do Vulcano’s gases come from?

Filicudi, a submerged paradise

The Cathedral of Lipari and the Norman Cloister of the Benedictine Monastery

The Gran Cratere of the Fossa: when the volcano becomes a sculptor

Lipari Castle, “fused” with the lava

The underwater fumarolic activity of Lisca Bianca

The Sciara del Fuoco

The stacks of Panarea

The Village of Capo Graziano

How pumice is formed

Alicudi, where time has stood still

The summit craters

The senses tell The Sciara del Fuoco

Between brush strokes of sulphur and clouds of steam: the fumaroles of the port of Vulcano

The pure white of the pumice quarries

Vulcano, the youngest of the Aeolian works of art

Stories of the sea and shipwrecks. The wrecks of the Aeolian Islands

The underwater morphological elements of the Aeolian Islands

Panarea, where sea and volcanoes become sculptors

At the heart of trade in history

Stromboli, the volcano that breathes

The prehistoric village of Cala Junco

The senses tell The salt lake of Lingua

“Strombolian” activity in the place where its definition was born

Tsunamis: a not uncommon phenomenon in Stromboli