Every year on 24 June, since 1750, Aci Trezza has hosted the folkloristic event “U pisci a mari” to celebrate St. John the Baptist, the town’s patron saint. It is a pantomime of the hard life of the fishermen and the eternal struggle for survival, worthy of the tales of Giovanni Verga and Erne...

The fauna of Etna was described in the 19th century by Antonio Galvagni, who claimed to have seen wolves, fallow deer, wild boar, roe deer, griffon vultures and otters in the waterways. In the past, Mount Etna was covered by ice expanses of considerable size, due to the very different climate from t...

Volcanic soil is by far among the most fertile. The abundance of sodium, calcium, magnesium and especially potassium make volcanic zones ideal places for growing vegetables and fruit trees, without invasive use of irrigation systems. However, this is true once the products of volcanic eruptions, la...

According to the Theory of Plate Tectonics, the lithosphere, the outermost rigid shell of the Earth’s crust, is divided into 20 rigid plates, also called lithospheric plates, that float on the asthenosphere below. The floating plates can: move away from each other; come together and collide; come...

A stratovolcano is generally a cone-shaped volcano formed by the overlapping of several layers of solidified lava, tephra, pumice and volcanic ash. Unlike shield volcanoes, stratovolcanoes are characterised by rather steep slopes (up to 45°) and periodic explosive eruptions....

It is often thought that Etna, with its almost 3400 metres of elevation and climbing, is the highest active volcano in Europe. But this is not true. From a purely official standpoint, the highest active volcano in Europe is Teide, with 3718 metres of elevation on the island of Tenerife, in the Cana...

Hephaestus was a builder and architect, goldsmith and gunsmith, blacksmith and inventor of mechanical objects. He forged the weapons of Heracles and Achilles, two great heroes. His cult has origins in Lemnos, where the ancient inhabitants believed that the volcanic fires coming out of the mountain M...

Volcanic eruptions are mainly divided into two types: effusive, where lava flows and escapes, and explosive, where the magma is fragmented by the explosion of the gas bubbles inside it. Explosive eruptions are in turn divided into 5-6 main types according to their energy, the volume of pyroclastic ...

UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Founded on 4 November 1945 in Paris, just after the end of the Second World War, it aims to support peace, strengthen links between cultures and create an environmentally friendly model of economic development. These imp...

Wolfgang Sartorius Von Waltershausen was a famous German geologist and astronomer who lived in 1800. His Der Aetna, recently translated from German, could be defined as the first truly scientific-volcanological treatise on Etna. Split into three volumes, it contained very accurate drawings of many a...