Under the volcano

This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.

11 March 1669 saw the largest eruption of Europe’s largest volcano in the Christian era. From a fissure south of the summit, three million tons of sulphur exploded into the atmosphere. Uncontainable rivers of molten rock consumed houses, farms and vineyards, fortifications, chapels and orchards, smothering them with what would become thick, black, jagged carpets of basalt. 

More lava coursed south-east towards where the catanesi implored Sant’Agata to save them. Icons and relics were mobilised to save the city and its souls. Then, five weeks to the day, like an exhausted army sapped of fuel and momentum, the viscous ooze floundered at the city gates. The flow was diverted around Castello Ursino via its moat and ejected into the Ionian Sea. The number of human lives lost is not known.

No wonder that earlier inhabitants of eastern Sicily cowered at “the dark, chthonic processes” and depredations of Mount Etna. Deriving its name from the Greek aitho (“I burn”), this colossus is enmeshed in Greco-Roman mythology. Deep in its heart was the furnace of Hephaestus, the blacksmith to the gods, where three cyclopic stokers fashioned Zeus’ thunderbolts. Vulcan, his counterpart, generated still more fire and thunder at the anvil on the occasions of Venus’ infidelity. An outlet of divine anger and retribution. Or Hell itself on earth?

In the calm of a monitoring centre in Catania, vulcanologists study developments on, in and under Mounts Etna, Stromboli and Vesuvius. The first’s magma contains little silica and consequently its lava is freer-flowing or “effusive”. Where magma is silica-rich, its viscosity blocks the vent pipe, producing a build-up of gas. Such eruptions are “explosive”. Vesuvius erupts less often than its two neighbours but can be much more catastrophic. 

To write The Fire in the Mountain, Helena Attlee lived for several months in Milo, a village on the slopes of the 11,011-foot timebomb. Her foci are place, character, event. She likens Etna to a nearby resident, predictable and tolerable: “So much better to have [her] as your neighbour … forever grumbling … as if she wanted to engage us in constant, one-sided conversation.” 

Research carried out by the University of Palermo found that in Nicolosi, a town often menaced by tremors and lava flows, most residents do not fear the volcano. Instead, they regard it with respect, as they might a supernatural force: usually benign, at times ruinous.

Co-habiting with a volcano comes at a cost. The lower slopes, land and properties have been “burnt, bulldozed or engulfed over the centuries”, leaving dark, gritty, sharp trails. Etna shapes this environment, not humans. However, the spoliation of fertile land is not permanent. Lava will become highly fertile soil in months, years or decades depending on its thickness. Weathered basalt attracts lichen and moss; iron and magnesium are released. Pumice hastens drainage and aeration. Vita ex interitu emergit. 

Pliny the Elder wrote of the arrival of pistachios in Italy. The trees came to Liguria with Lucius Vitellius, a Roman governor, when he returned from Syria in AD 35. They spread southwards through the peninsula and soon took root in Sicily. Once there, though, pistacia vera remained unexploited as a crop until the Arab conquest in the ninth century (Palermo is nearer to Tunis than to Rome). 

In some places, the nuts are grown and harvested on the mountain as they were 1,200 years ago. One of those places, west of Etna, is the town of Bronte, the lodestone for lovers of pistachios, or “Sicilian emeralds”. The tree is grafted and tightly bound to a self-seeded terebinth whose roots plumb deep through layers of lava to find water. The nuts are hand-picked from the twisted, stunted trees every other year by the clambering, crawling, stretching owners and huge parties of locals. 

Similar stories are told of the bees, the hive and Zafferana honey and the grapes, the vine and Etna Rosso. That is to say, how an arid climate and a merciless summer sun produce high-quality foodstuffs without modern farming methods and via tiny cottage-industry collectives. As the Japanese show respect by using the honorific Fuji-san, Sicilians say: Mamma Etna duna chiù di quantu leva (Mamma Etna gives more than she takes away). 

With her well-established mix of cultural history, long-piece travel journalism and rapportage, Attlee is scrutinising the Italian experience one book at a time: landscapes, lemons, violins, volcanoes. I look forward to reading her future investigations into the Church, Mafia and Serie A …