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Volcanoes
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Near the top of Mount Etna nothing grows. The rocks are sharp underfoot, the landscape more other-worldly than the moon. After being singed down on the coast, you feel the sharp temperature drop in your chest. At first you can't make out the craters; then you see them everywhere, sullenly fuming, caving away, staining and scarring the rocks yellow and rust and elephant-skin grey. Gusts of wind open up the black sand to reveal bright-white snow and ice, even in high summer. Coming back down, with your eyes no longer fixed on the summit, you become newly aware of human interactions with the forces of nature. The concrete stumps of ski resorts, swept away in the 2002 explosion that opened up a new five-mile-long fissure, tell one story; the graffiti daubed on rocks tell another. Further down, between the tree line and the lava, is a noxious band of garbage, the gleam of countless plastic bottles catching the sun.

Mount Etna from the south
Valle del bove

Coming from the cold climate of Britain, the Italian south has always held a special allure for me. Years ago I took two long trips from Naples to Sicily – one by train, one by boat – that stayed in my memory as glorious bursts of colour, food, wine, and the layered, battered splendour of successive civilizations. Then I married an Italian from Rome. Rome is far enough south that northern Italians distrust it, and far enough north that it distrusts everyone further south. To Romans, never mind Milanese, the deep South is Gomorrah, a sun-baked inferno of conmen and Mafiosi that pockets the North's taxes. If northerners might concede that most southerners are not themselves corrupt, they still dismiss them as a primitive people driven by superstition and syrupy attachment to family – which is precisely what drives us utilitarian British into their arms.

My stalled plot to drag my family south finally gained traction at London's Natural History Museum, where my six-year-old son became fascinated by the geology of volcanoes. Volcanoes have all the elements you need to engage a child's imagination: smoke, fire, and destruction on a grand scale. And coincidentally or not, the Italian south contains the only active volcanoes in mainland Europe. So off to southern Italy we went.

We started in Naples. On my Roman father-in-law's urging, my wife had left all her jewellery at home. The taxi driver who picked us up at the train station obliged by ripping us off, then dropping us half a mile from our hotel. But our hotel room had a direct view of Vesuvius placidly smoking, and the next morning an ostentatiously honest driver took us to the departure station for the Circumvesuviana train that, as its name proudly attests, circles endlessly around the volcano.

Circumvesuvian

The train is a disgrace, boiling, rattly, overcrowded and covered in graffiti, and so a gratifyingly chaotic way to arrive at Italy's most-visited tourist attraction. It reminds you that this country is so outrageously blessed with world-class historical sights that it barely bothers to attract people to them. The elegant Neapolitan lady who sat opposite us swore it was the only line in Naples that hasn't been modernised. She was on her way to feed the fish in her son's apartment; she had three sons, and was permanently occupied in looking after their homes while they were away. All three, we learned, were lawyers; Neapolitan avvocati are reputed to be the best in Italy, perhaps because the city provides them with plenty of practise.

But Pompeii is a marvel unto itself. Buried by the 79AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, preserved in the absence of air and moisture, rediscovered in 1599 and excavated over the past 250 years, it offers like few places on Earth the opportunity to walk in our ancestors' footsteps and feel how different – but even more how similar – their lives were to ours. Despite the scalding heat our son couldn't be dissuaded from walking down another street with its stepping stones to keep robes from getting muddied, exploring another house with its fresh mosaics and frescoes, and wondering at the scale of the theatres and amphitheatre. And in the background, towering over it all, Vesuvius: the reason we are here, the volcano as preserver as well as destroyer.

Pompeii
Pompeii

Volcanoes grip our imagination because we cannot control or predict them. Throughout modern history the deadliest eruptions have been of quiet volcanoes. So it was with Vesuvius, and there is no better account of its shock and awe than the letter Pliny the Younger wrote to his friend Tacitus shortly after the disaster:

“The sea seemed to roll back upon itself, and to be driven from its banks by the convulsive motion of the earth; it is certain at least the shore was considerably enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it… Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. 'Let us leave the road while we can still see,' I said, 'or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.' We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.“You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.”

Pliny, whose uncle died while trying to rescue a friend and his family, was eighteen at the time. The experience must have stayed with him throughout his life. Even today Pompeii is haunting. When my son saw the plaster casts made from the voids left in the pyroclastic flow by men, women, children and dogs who were engulfed nearly two millennia ago, I felt sure these non-existent witnesses – these absences made solid – would stay with him for years to come.

People
Dog

On my previous trips around southern Italy I wasn't as aware as I might have been of the volcanic arc, produced by the clash of the Eurasian and African plates, that sweeps from Naples, through the Aeolian Islands off Sicily, to Sicily itself. I did, though, vividly recall the eerie sight of Stromboli, one of the most active, a dark, smoking cone looming out of the sea on the ferry ride from Naples. So the day after seeing Pompeii we took the hydrofoil to the islands. Four hours into the voyage, just as Stromboli hove into view, my son fell asleep. He missed the whole show, including the necklace of equally striking islands that follows, and woke in pitch darkness when we reached the port of Lipari, where we were staying.

Stromboli
Stromboli

We made it back to Stromboli a few days later and climbed the narrow streets amid prickly pears, caper plants and bougainvillea to the piazza at the top. The little town has a wild, frontier feel, but standing guard over it is a large, fine church. This struck me as a massive piece of wishful thinking, though it has survived numerous eruptions since the eighteenth century. I couldn't help wondering whether the fashion designers Dolce and Gabbana, who vacation on Stromboli, are welcome here.

Church

The island was the setting for Roberto Rossellini's 1950 film Stromboli: terra di Dio. In the film, Ingmar Bergman plays a Lithuanian refugee who escapes internment by marrying an Italian soldier, who promises her a beautiful life on his home island. When she arrives she discovers a harsh, barren volcano with a tiny, conservative population that ostracises outsiders. At the climax, as she ascends the volcano, she becomes at the same time a nobody and an everywoman, stripped back to her essence. The film was a notorious flop, not least because an extramarital affair between Rossellini and Bergman became an international scandal. Any guide will take you to the houses they stayed in, which connected by an out-of-view passage. This precaution, on top of being on a volcanic cone in the middle of nowhere, turned out to be insufficient to ward off the world's press. These days the film is widely seen as a neorealist masterpiece; certainly at a time when Sicily is struggling with daily arrivals of boatloads of migrants from north Africa, its depiction of the way Italy treats uninvited visitors is newly topical.

Stromboli: terra di Dio
Stromboli: terra di Dio

After dinner we sailed round Stromboli's lava-scarred northern flank and, in choppy seas, watched as the crater roared and threw out an incandescent volcanic bomb, flaring an intense red high into the night sky. My son was riveted, though quickly devastated that his friends would never believe him because I hadn't managed to catch it on camera.

Lipari, the island where we based ourselves, is the biggest in the volcanic archipelago. The museum on its acropolis houses an extraordinary haul of riches from seven thousand years of settlement. Ancient necropolises allow you to witness how successive civilizations dealt with death. Room after room of Greek vases dramatically depict episodes from legends, testifying to the wealth of this important Greek colony. Greek and Roman theatrical marks evince the variety of entertainments in the classical world. Thousands of large amphorae recovered from shipwrecks stack up to the ceiling, conjuring a scene of busy, lucrative sea traffic. As you peer down at delicate jewellery, then glance up through the windows, you're reminded that people lived well here, thousands of years ago.

Lipari

As likely as not, you'll share the place with a few sleepy guards. This is Italy's modern dilemma: how to balance daily life with its incomparable patrimony; how to showcase the past without becoming its prisoner. Here the answer seemed to be to prioritise the main exhibits, while giving up on the rest. When we walked through to a museum of volcanology, the lights and air conditioning were off and we were bitten to pieces.

Next door, we stepped into the island's cathedral, a glorious confection in pastels and painted stucco which the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V rebuilt on a grand scale in the sixteenth century, a statement of intent after the Turkish admiral Barbarossa and his French allies destroyed Lipari and enslaved its entire population. Facing the cathedral was another striking church, the way in front overgrown with weeds. It seemed closed and we were about to leave when the plangent notes of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto wafted towards us. We picked our way over. The building had been freshly restored, probably with European Union funds, and a boy, at most twelve, was playing up a storm on a grand piano. Around him was a small exhibition about the many writers who have been drawn to this region. The whole ensemble struck me as emblematic of the Italian south: an overwhelming wealth of culture, a state that struggles to know what to do with it all. Money for renovation, not weed killer.

Church

Via the island of Vulcano, with its ancient mud baths and fumaroles and stunning black volcanic beaches, we sailed for Sicily. At Messina barely three miles of water separate the Mediterranean's largest island from the mainland; this infamous chokepoint is home to the legendary sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, who imperilled myriad generations of sailors. We arrived without mishap and boarded a surprisingly modern train for Taormina. Ten minutes from our destination we ground to a halt in a tiny station. There were fires on the line ahead, the conductor informed us; we would be stuck for at least an hour, and we might want to call a taxi at the station bar instead. We got out, quickly found there wasn't a station bar, and headed back to the platform just as the train was pulling away. These things are part of the Sicily experience, and invariably a friendly local will sympathise and offer to help.

Like any Sicilian, at some point he or she will tell you that Sicily has been abandoned by the rest of Italy. For decades the politicians in Rome have talked about building a bridge across the Strait of Messina. Sicilians agree that it's a wonderful idea, and that it will never, ever happen. They may be right. While Italy has spent many billions of euros building high speed rail links across the mainland, much of the railway that loops around this huge island has only one track, and if a train is stuck somewhere down that track, as happened to us later that day, the entire system comes unstuck. One suspects that this may be inefficiency by design: the provinces of Sicily seem even less interested in being integrated than the mainland does with the island.

Taormina, finally reached only four hours late, is incomparably beautiful, an ancient tropical paradise with sweeping views from the toe of Calabria to the epic volcanic cone of Mount Etna, perfectly framed by the Greek-Roman amphitheatre at the top of town. Here you can enjoy the sight in safety; further down the coast, you reach towns that have been obliterated by eruptions and seismic activity. Many were rebuilt in a baroque style so proud and golden and extravagant that you might think Etna is a force of creation as much as destruction.

Taormina
Taormina

Have the volcanoes of southern Italy helped make its people more passionate, more intense, more insecure and determined to cling together than the rest of the country? It's easy to think so. These are people for whom life seems a constant, explosive drama; for whom the intensity of the now is more important than chasing the future. Perhaps living in a risky environment nurtures the glue-like family bonds that we witnessed the further south we went.

Yet volcanoes have the power to touch and shake us all. The great English writer D.H. Lawrence, who lived in Taormina during the 1920s, wrote this poem about Mount Etna, implausibly entitled Peace:

Peace is written on the doorstep

In lava.

Peace, black peace congealed.

My heart will know no peace

Till the hill bursts.

Brilliant, intolerable lava,

Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass,

Walking like a royal snake down the mountain towards the sea.

Forests, cities, bridges

Gone again in the bright trail of lava.

Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots,

And now the olive leaves thousands of feet below the lava fire.

Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep.

Within, white-hot lava, never at peace

Till it burst forth blinding, withering the earth;

To set again into rock,

Grey-black rock.

Call it Peace?

On the summit of Mount Etna, it's easy to see how Lawrence saw the mountain as a metaphor for the pent-up passions that are always ready to erupt under the solid-seeming surface of society and individual lives. In an analogous sense, the people who live on its slopes see the volcanic cycle as a natural and necessary part of life. The rich volcanic soil feeds them, nurturing olives, citrus fruit and pistachios and excellent wine. To them, Etna is a provider, not a hazard. Many call her the “Mother of Sicily.”

I found this belief in volcanoes as life-forces wherever I went. On Stromboli, we asked the owner of a gift shop whether she wasn't scared of an explosion. The volcano, she replied, was the very opposite of scary. “We see it as a father figure who’s here to protect us,” she explained.

It took me a while to understand this, but I think I do. Volcanologists might predict that Stromboli, or Etna, or Vesuvius, will explode within our lifetimes; that Catania or Naples might be engulfed; they might warn that the Italian state's emergency plans are useless, that the notorious SS268, the designated escape carriageway from Vesuvius, is still incomplete even though construction started in the 1980s. But the people who live near them trust them more than the state to provide their livelihood, and develop an almost spiritual relationship with them. They are closer to and more humbled by the power of nature than most of us can imagine.

In this unusually sultry summer, during this age of global warming, that felt like a lesson well worth learning. Climbing a rumbling, shaking volcano, peering into the abyss, we become aware of our precarious toehold on the world. We touch and inhale the elements that we and the Earth are made from, and everything beyond us, as if a line reaches out from the Earth's core, through the mouth of the mountain, to the stars.

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