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Etna

Etna, The “Unesco” fire

The air is rarefied at 2.800 metres of height. Black and white interchange and lava and ice alternate. Behind, the North-East crater (3.350m) slowly puffs in the silence and it is sometimes interrupted by the gusts of the wind. “The beast is quiet”, as Guy de Maupassant would say, “it is sleeping there at the bottom”. Taormina and Castelmola are bright, you can almost touch the Channel that can be guessed behind the Peloritani mountains.

On the left the Milazzo’s edge is like a drawing in the Tyrrhenian Sea and it indicates Vulcano, Lipari and the Salina’s hills. An amazing view to be discovered even before reaching Catania and its charming differences whose highest edge is represented in its province by the Etna, one of Unesco’s World Heritage Sites since 2013, it is the most active volcano in Europe, it has a diameter of 35 kilometres, a surface of 1.250 kilometres and a number of craters. Catania is underneath and it is offered to visitors with its gulf and its plane and the distances are so small that you can chose to ski on the Etna in the morning then swim in the waves in the afternoon. Before that you can have fun on the volcano. A possible route? You can reach 2.400 metres of height by the cableway then you can go up six-hundred meters by the jeep then you walk for around forty minutes around the Bocca Nuova. Near the crater the ground is warm: the magma inside it reaches 400°C. On its Eastern borders the Valle del Bove drops for one thousand metres and from its depth smoke waves stand out and they wrap the above crest. It sounds being really at the edge of the world. Actually you are in the Natural Park of Etna that stretches from the top of the volcano up to the hills along 59.000 hectares of land divided into five areas where lots of attractions are offered like sport activities, horse-riding excursions, green areas and so on. Amazing attractions such as Giarre, Milo, Randazzo, Trecastelli and Bronte, to be appreciated either for their beauty or for their taste: Bronte is the reign of the pistachio nuts.

The Natural Park of Alcantara is the ideal place to do sports activities; an unusual landscape along the river Alcantara that marks the board between the province of Catania and the province of Messina and it also represents the binding between the big lava cone of Etna and the calcareous and marble formations of the Peloritani mountains. The whole area is featured by the waterfalls, the lakes and deep canyons called the “Alcantara Canyons” where the only volcano flowing cave is located, called “the cave of hundreds horses”.

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