Up and down Italy’s volcanoes, accompanied by literary reminiscences

“I,” he went on, “have a rose that I water every day. I have three volcanoes that I clean every week. Because I clean the extinct one too. You never know. The fact that I own them is good for my volcanoes and good for my rose.’ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, too, was fascinated by silent, smoking cones, as can be seen from this extract from his most famous book, *The Little Prince*. After all, even the recent images of Etna puffing away demonstrate just how unpredictable – and therefore fascinating – the calderas and craters are, which set our imagination ablaze, to say the least. In Italia there are around seventy volcanoes, across the peninsula and the islands, all or almost all of which can be reached on foot; they therefore make for a truly evocative destination, especially at the start of autumn. Some of these ‘dragons’ lie buried beneath our seas, others have emerged to the surface and then disappeared, yet their reputation remains intact, as in the case of Ferdinandea Island off the coast of Sciacca, which for a few weeks alone caused the governments of the Old Continent to become stubbornly fixated on it as they vainedly contested its ownership. Or, like the Marsili and the Vavilov, they lie at such depths that they cannot be approached in the slightest. For the others, here are some travel itineraries. Right to the very edge of the craters, in the company of the most evocative literary reminiscences.