Etna, is not only a volcano, but an island inside the island. Visit Etna is mainly dear the conquer of its top, over 3.300 mt high, It main try to experience the emotion of been atop the island in a different world and dimension where sounds, colours, landscapes are different and same costrainting with all you than you can find down in the island.
This magnificent volcano, visible from all the east of Sicily it's like a giant that control the island. As a father sometimes loving, sometimes cruel it has been admired by thousands of Sicilians as premonitory of rain or misfortunes with its spectacular and sometimes merciless lava eruptions. Etna is a place of contrasts. Love and hate: on the one hand dispenser of fertile land capable of giving fruits and delicious wines, on the other destroyer of what It gave before made valuable by humans. Woods of chestnut trees, birches, maples, beeches, oaks, cutted by new eruptions that have destroyed part of them. The cold, deep winter blanket of snow and ice cut from the cast of a magma heated over 1000 degrees.
from the top of the vulcano, on a clear day, you can see just after sunrise to the spectacular cone of shadow of the volcano to the projected Madonie away and then, throughout the day, the Aeolian islands scattered in front of Milazzo, the close Messina, Calabria stretched almost to Sicily, the countless small villages clinging to the hills and mountains around.
Etna is surrounded by graceful and elegant villages: Milo, Fornazzo, Piedimonte Etneo, Linguaglossa, Adrano, Bronte, Milo, Randazzo, Zafferana Etnea, Maletto all builted with black lava stone donated by the volcano. All around also grow lush vineyards, orchards and forests and at the base of the volcano many citrus groves.
Etna is beautiful in every season.
On winter you can practice cross-country skiing and ski mountaineering and walks with snow shoes or, for the most trained, climbing the peak with crampons.
In the rest of the year you can do the different excursions either on foot or by bike thanks to hundreds kilometers trails and dirt tracks that cross the flanks of the volcano between forests and lava flows.
For those who love adventure, you can also stay overnight in a sleeping bag in characteristic bivouacs in lava rock, once homes of pastors to summer pastures at high altitude, all with working fireplace.
For those who enjoy long distance, however, you can make the Great Crossing of Etna: 100 km around the volcano with the addition of the climbing to the craters. It request 2 days by bike or on skis, and 4 days to walk so much passion and spirit of adaptation to an extraordinary adventure!
The thrill of climbing Mount Etna is at all possible, even to those who have physical difficulty, reach the top through the cable car and 4 x 4 buses that connect the refuge Sapienza (2000 m asl) reached by car in the south.
