Stromboli

Stromboli is one of Italy's (and Europe's) few active volcanoes. We sailed into the harbor on the north side of the island one afternoon and by 5:30pm we were dressed in hiking boots and armed with a guide and helmets to begin our 3000 foot climb to the summit so we could peer into the active crater. We could hear Stromboli thundering above us every few minutes.

As we climbed we had fantastic views of the island and the sea. In the photo where I'm looking back down, our boat is one of the white specs at the extreme right of the picture.

Once we got to the steeper switchbacks we ran into other groups who had slowed down higher up. There were probably a hundred people climbing that night. We sat around the crater and enjoyed Strobmoli's frequent and "mildly explosive" eruptions. The term "Strombolian eruption" is used to describe continuous but mild eruptions like this. Stromboli has been doing it every few minutes for a couple of thousand years, though every now and then there's a bigger one that results in the more garden type of volcanic destruction. After watching the volcano throw glowing rocks a few hundred feet up in the air from a half a dozen vents for about an hour (the last eruption was considerably more powerful and scared the crap out of us), we shuffled down an ash field and reached the bottom just before midnight. 

A couple of websites that track volcanic activity worldwide had some nice photos from the evening we were there, with a note that volcanic activity in Stromboli is increasing (though it is still within the normal range : ). The guy who took this photo could have been sitting next to me and photographing without a zoom - it's what I saw happening a few hundred feet from the end of my boots.

Several times during the evening we wondered what prompts somewhat sane people to clamber up a steep hill to peer into an erupting volcano. No good answers here. But it was easily the highlight of my sailing trip in the Aeolian islands. From Stromboli we sailed to the island of Vulcano where we hiked up yet another volcano - though this one only leaks steamy gases. Then we walked back down to the beach and waded into a pool of hot bubbling sulfurous mud where the ladies from our boats started a trend by replacing their bikini tops with dollops of steaming mud.

Strange fact - I have visited both Snæfellsjökull in Iceland and Stromboli here - the fictional entry and exit points in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.