Mount Etna is the most active volcano in Europe, and it smokes over the east coast of Sicily on most days of the year. It can be climbed, but not on your own terms. A cable car goes up from Rifugio Sapienza on the southern side, above the last trees and onto bare grey ash. From the top station only an authorised guide takes you higher, walking small groups across open ash to the rim of the smoking craters near 3,400 metres. Nothing grows up there and nothing shelters you, and the air stays cold and thin through high summer. The whole zone shuts at short notice whenever the mountain stirs. Lower down, the Silvestri craters ask nothing of anyone. They are side vents, openings that broke out on the flank instead of at the summit, quiet long enough now that you can walk right around their rims on loose red-black cinder. The path starts beside the road and opens onto the lower slopes with the Mediterranean far below you.
After dark, when a vent is erupting, you watch fountains of glowing lava go up off the summit and rivers of it slide down the black rock in the distance. From December into spring two small stations run lifts over snow lying on that same rock, and in an active year there is lava burning above the pistes. The mountain has done worse than glow. In 1669 it opened fissures down its southern flank, ran for months, buried villages and broke through the walls of Catania before pouring into the sea. The city was rebuilt out of the lava that had destroyed it, and its baroque centre still carries the dark sheen of that stone. The vines below the ash fields owe the mountain something as well. Phylloxera killed most of Europe's old vineyards, but the insect cannot manage Etna's loose volcanic sand, so the vines on these slopes are ungrafted and more than a century old. They go into Etna Rosso, a pale, high-acid red that tastes of the ground it came out of.