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D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia

The fire-breathing giant and its devastating eruptions have left deep inspirational impressions on Mediterranean cultures all through the ages. Early conjecture by the Greeks explained its activity as banished giants working underworld forges, along with the grisly monster Typhon, imprisoned there by Zeus, who made the earth tremble with his twisting and turning. The fitting name of ‘Etna’ derives from a Greek word meaning ‘to burn’, though the Arabs preferred to refer to it as Jebel Utlamat, ‘mountain par excellence’, whence derives its modern-day Latinised alias, Mongibello. However for the Sicilians it is simply a’ muntagna (‘the mountain’), and strictly feminine.

Shepherds’ hut backed by Etna’s central craters (Walk 6)

Sicily’s massive landmark volcano began life thanks to submarine activity in a long-gone gulf in eastern Sicily over half a million years ago, and appears to rise directly from the Ionian Sea. It needed Scottish geologist Charles Lyell in 1858 to demonstrate that it was the outcome of small-scale recurrent eruptions instead of a single cataclysm, the prevalent theory of the time.